Hello Friends!
Today I outlining what we are growing for our family of 8 on our 2 acres, plus a little land we are using from my in laws.
Here’s the video showing the gardening spaces
To start off I will talk about the Fun Garden check out the video I made showing it
This garden has herbs, strawberry mint, chocolate mint, parsley, a mix of basil, oregano, lemon thyme, thyme and I had catnip but I think I will have to replace it. Just off the deck is also lemon balm. In the other beds I have an eggplant, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, beets, celery, lettuce and broccoli. We also have a bed full of strawberries!
I also have a GreenStalk, its a vertical garden that I mainly grow salad greens in. I do have a pocket that has spearmint from our front flower bed and some nasturtium’s. You can find more about the GreenStalk planter here. https://bit.ly/5musthavegardeningitems
Next up is the big garden. This garden has 8 plots. They are each 32×32.
The top two is full of flowers and one row of San Marzano tomatoes’ that were volunteers at my in laws. One day I would like to have enough flowers to sell, until then we are practicing and trying new ways of growing them. This year I tried growing them in 3 ft beds. My plan will be to try different arrangements and give them away as part of the Growing Kindness Project. This is a group that’s “mission is to empower, educate, and encourage individuals to cultivate kindness and connection in their communities by growing and giving flowers. “https://www.growingkindnessproject.org/
Garden beds 3-8 are full of food! In the first row of beds 3-5 I have flowers planted. I have some calendula, sunflowers, zinnias, Echinacea, coreopsis, peony, chamomile, marigolds, lavender and a few other perennials.
Bed #3 gets the most shade out of these beds so I planted mostly plants that don’t like 6+ hours of sun. This includes onions, beets, carrots, radishes, turnips, pole beans and bush beans, cucumbers and squash that came up from last year.
The next bed, bed #4, starts off with a cattle panel full of tomatoes and a few peppers. Otis then followed up with Okra, 5+ varieties of squash, a row of yellow beams, a couple eggplants, and a cantaloupe that came up from last year. After those rows Mia and Matthew have some plants growing. They have a mix indian corn, marigolds, beans peppers and tomatoes.
The 5th and final bed in this row of beds is supposed to be our large melon patch. We have some growing but they aren’t doing as well as we had hoped. Now we did get rain the last couple days and Bo got the weeding done, hopefully they will catch up. The melons take up a large part of this bed but not all of it! I have 3 types of beans a puffs a couple basil plants and lots of tomatoes coming along. I’m so grateful to have these as most of them were from friends and family that didn’t need all of them and some volunteer plants. A large amount of ours died. I’m not sure if it was a soil problem or having a newborn this spring.
The last 3 beds I rotate each year. The front couple rows change but the rest has potatoes, corn and pumpkins. This year bed #6 has 3 rows of jade bush beans and the rest is full of potatoes. Along the side we have red raspberries and asparagus growing. Bed #7 has Eliza and Eliana’s plants growing at the front. They have a mix of sunflowers, zinnias, Indian corn, tomatoes, marigolds and Dragon tongue beans. Then we have a few rows of corn followed by pumpkins. The last bed has some more jade beans and the remainder of that bed has corn.
Whew! We made it through the garden !
Now onto the fruit trees and bushes because that’s short and sweet. We have 2 cherry trees, 2 pear trees and 2 blueberry bushes. We are fortunate enough that my in laws have several other fruit trees and berry bushes. This spring we added to the orchard more apple, pear and peach trees along with more blueberry bushes
Finally the animals. We currently have 2 sets of bees that actually sit on the edge of our property. If we didnt rent from the neighbor and my in laws property was right next to ours we would still have room for them on our 2 acres.
This spring we got baby turkeys, broilers and more laying hens. We recently had 50 broilers processed for us and some family. We ended up with 269 pounds of meat from them. The 5 turkeys will continue to grow and move around the yard until the end of August and we are hoping the 19 new layers will start laying this winter. With the new layers we are up to 36 layers and 1 rooster. I have hopes that we won’t run out of eggs this winter 🙂
Also this spring we got 2 calves. They were about 800 pounds each when we got them and they are doing really well. I should mention that they aren’t actually on our 2 acres, they are on my in laws property. But like the bees, if they needed to be on our property we could have made it worked. On the garage side of our yard we don’t have any livestock, so they could have been over there. Last but not least is our dog Otis. We got him the end of April check out this post sharing how busy we were in April. https://bit.ly/aprilhasbeenbusy He is a short haired border collie and he is doing good. Its been interesting watching him grow up as well. I told Bo some days its like we have 3 kids under 2 
.
There you have it. All the things we have growing (mostly) on our 2 acres in 2022.
Until Next Time,
Julie
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28