Seeds Sown for The Future

It's the most wonderful time of the year, well in my humble opinion it is.... it's the start of the 2022 growing season at the Stand With Nature Southern Garden. Here is middle Tennessee we can't plant anything outside until the threat of frost has passed, and it happens to be on Mothers day weekend each year.

above are our roma tomatoes, planted with sweet basil and calendula.

That works out to be two fold, I get to plant all of my seed starts, but I also can easily recruit my husband and kids into helping me plant since its Mothers day weekend, it works out well, I'm thinking especially when the kids are teenagers down the road lol.

Above are the hostas I have on our front porch.... having grown up in San Diego CA, I now feel that hostas are a real southern plant, they thrive here and do so well, and everyone has them, it's somewhat of a right of passage in a southern garden I feel.

We have a backyard that is full of shade trees, and because of this we had to build our garden out front. It has turned out to be a blessing in disguise as kids walking home from school and folks out on their evening walks always seem to stop and enjoy the plants or ask what they are, a fun way to get people, especially little ones hooked on gardening!

above is my mothers day gift, a screen over my strawberries so they are safe from birds

We are all about recycling in our home and garden, my husband came across this old 6 pane wood window frames and an old rusted foldable dog gate... we turned them into these beautiful trellises for our vining veggies to climb on. This bed has borage and loofa in the bottom left corner, in the middle is rosella, borage, calendula and marigold and the far right corner is zucchinis.

fThe bed below has cucumbers, tomatillos, sweet peppers, hot peppers, borage, calandula and malbar spniach. I am most excited about malbar spinach, it is a tropical spinach that thrives in hot humid climates... just like Tennessee... Im eager to put it into our salads this summer.

Our herb bed is already super productive, I've been able to harvest chives, green onions, oregano and thyme. I was able to dry it to store in our spice cabinet for cooking. It amazes me how incredibly different tasting fresh herbs from our own garden are compared to that at the store! It's so worth growing your own, not only do you have fresh herbs on hand for cooking during the growing season, but you also have them to dry for fall and winter!

IThis past fall we planted about 50 garlic plants, it was our first time and boy were we nervous... but the crop of garlic is looking fantastic we plan to harvest it within the coming week and let it dry out so we can enjoy it in our cooking.

A new addition to the garden this year are medicinal herbs, I am slowly building up my collection, here is one of the beds.

Here is our front window flower bed, we have two of them that are on either side of our front porch. I have pink honeysuckle, clematis, coneflower, butterfly bush, gladiola, sweet potato fine, purple heart, cosmos and sunflowers in them, along with huge elephant ears! Once they get growing it fills up fast, so fast infact that I plan to move out the pink honey suckle in the fall to a new spot.

This is one section of our berries, it is the raspberries, blackberries and huckleberries. I also blueberry, beauty berry and elderberry bushes as well.

This trellis has all types of vining flowers and the other side of the bed had corn, sunflowers and squash. It doesn't look like much now, but it is a lot of stuff!

I plan posting a garden growth update once every week, so stay tuned for next weeks update, we are going to be getting a lot of rain, and the plants love it and always have a huge jump in their growth.