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20 Beautiful Garden Plans

January 24, 2017 by Morgan Stevens Leave a Comment

Spring is just around the corner so we want to share with you 20 Beautiful Garden Plans to inspire your green thumb! We found these beautiful garden plans while getting ready for our garden. This has inspired many of the kids in my house to get ready for our garden.

If you like to garden, then you might also like to see what we grow in our late summer garden.

beautiful garden plans

20 Beautiful Garden Plans

beautiful garden plans

20 Beautiful Garden Plans to Inspire You

beautiful garden plans 1

  • We love this guide on Choosing Best Soil Mix for Raised Beds. -via SumoGardener
  • Here’s some great ideas on how to plan for your garden. -via Charming Imperfections
  • Find 101 gardening secrets the experts never tell you by visiting this site. -via dengarden
  • Spring is also another great time for fall vegetable gardening. -via Better Homes & Gardens
  • Here is a great Kitchen Gardens. -via Design Chic
  • Here are 15 DIY How to make your backyard garden ideas. -via DIY & crafts magazine
  • Talk about useful –> Intensive Gardening: Grow More Food in Less Space (With the Least Work!) -via Mother Earth News

We Love These Garden Plan Ideas!

beautiful garden plans

  • Want to learn how to Make a garden on your balcony? -via Hubpages
  • Here is where you can Learn to Make a Pallet Garden in 7 Easy Steps.  -via BrightNest
  • Here’s a clever idea: Vegetable Garden Design: DIY Bean Trellis -via Gardenista
  • I can’t believe these 31 Beautiful Yet Practical Vegetable Garden Designs -via Gardenoholic
  • If you want  42 Free DIY Raised Garden Bed Plans & Ideas that You Can Build in One Day check out this site! -via Morning Chores
  • This is 10 Ways to Style Your Very Own Vegetable Garden! -via homedit
  • Check out these 12 Inspiring Square Foot Gardening Plans-Ideas For Plant Spacing! -via The Self-sufficient Living

So Many More Great Garden Plans

beautiful garden plans

  • Learn how to Prepare Your Garden Beds Now For Next Year. -via Food Storage Moms
  • Here you can find Vegetable Gardens That Look Great. -via Better Homes & Gardens
  •  These are some of The 11 Best Vertical Garden Ideas. -via T11e 11 Best
  • Look here for 10 Simple Gardening Ideas. -via Hub Pages
  •  Love this! My Plot. -via Mark’s Veg Plot
  • Find 41 Cheap And Easy Backyard DIYs You Must Do This Summer here. -via Peggy Wang (Buzzfeed)
  • If these don’t work for you or you have much more room come check out Plan A Garden For Free! -via Better Homes & Gardens

For more country living ideas come check us out on the Mothering with a Purpose Facebook page!

Filed Under: Country Living, Gardening Tagged With: country living, farm life, food, garden, garden 2017, garden design, garden planning, garden plans, gardener, gardening, gardening with kids, grow, homestead, organic garden, planning a garden, plants, raised beds, spring garden, sumogardener

Late Summer Garden on the Farm

September 24, 2016 by Allie 1 Comment

I always enjoy our late summer garden on the farm more than other times of the year for a variety of reasons. One, because of hot summer temperatures most of the bugs are gone. Two, because that means it’s time to start planning and planting a fall garden. My garden has been more than bountiful this year and I have been able to give away a lot of garden produce to several friends.

late summer garden

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links which means that if you click a link and make a purchase that I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Late Summer Garden

The butternut squash vines haven’t ceased to amaze me yet. Since early June they’ve been sending off little butternut squashes. The squashes themselves take about 6 weeks to ripen until they are ready to pick which means we’ve been harvesting and eating butternut squash all summer long. Here it is the end of September and the butternut squash vines are still going strong and refuse die. I purchased heirloom butternut squash seeds this year and they haven’t let me down yet. I will definitely be planting butternut squash in my garden again!

late summer garden

I planted radishes this spring and harvested all of those by late May. What I didn’t know was that some had reseeded themselves so when the rains came in September…guess what…more radishes. I also have a mystery bed of radishes that I really don’t remember planting. Needless to say, I have more of these peppery roots than I know what a family of 6 can do with. A friend suggested I pickle them.

late summer garden

I am so thankful that my kids help me in our organic garden!

This weekend a cold front is slated to come through. Temperatures won’t drop enough to kill my garden, but instead will bring it much needed rain. I’m looking forward to Monday when it’s supposed to be in the 60s! I think the older I get the less I tolerate hot temperatures.

Do you garden? What kinds of tips or useful information would you like for me to talk about? Be sure to check out the Mothering with a Purpose Facebook page!

Filed Under: Country Living, Gardening Tagged With: butternut, butternut seeds, butternut squash, fall garden, food, gardening, gardening in texas, harvest, heirloom butternut, organic, organic garden, radishes, squash seeds, summer garden

Garden Update May 2010

May 27, 2010 by Allie

This post was originally published May 27, 2010, when I still lived in the city.

Wild Plum in Texas
It’s been a couple weeks (I think at least) since my last garden update, so it’s time for another one!

How about these squash and zucchini plants! Already, I’m getting little yellow squash,

First Yellow Squash of the Season
and itsy bitsy cucumbers!

First Cuke of the Season
Not to mention more salad and tomatoes than I can eat (that’s what canning’s for). Heck, the corn is already getting tassels on it!

Corn Tassles
And I only spend an average of four hours per week in the garden. Thank goodness I have a friend helping out.

In addition to all this gardening that I hope will feed my family almost completely over the summer, I’ve also been out harvesting wild fruits. The dewberries are almost all gone, but the wild blackberries are just beginning to ripen.

Wild Blackberry Canes in Texas
In fact, even the starts I transplanted at my home are covered in ripe, juicy blackberries.

Harvested Wild Blackberries and Dewberries
The wild grapes look lovely this year–hopefully I can get them before annoying kids smash them like they did last year.

Mustang Grapes 2010 Texas
I also found a wild plum thicket. My family called these hog plums growing up, and they are some of the sweetest prizes that nature has to offer.

Wild Plum Thicket
Wild plums ripen at various color stages around these parts, and ripe wild plums of different colors are easily found on the same tree.

Wild Plum in Texas II
I almost have enough to make jelly.

Picked Wild Plums
I also asked one of my neighbors a week ago if I could pick her plums off the purple leaf plum tree in her front yard, of which I got enough to make two purple plum meringue pies and canned the leftover juice. Another neighbor allowed me to pick her apricots off her trees. The unfortunate thing was that about 40 percent of the apricots have apple maggots inside (which jump by the way), so I had to bake them (oh the smell was torture) and then throw them in the garden. However, I did get enough to make seven jars of apricot jam.

Purple Leaf Plum
 

Filed Under: Gardening

Sneaky Chef Visits Dallas

May 14, 2010 by Allie

SneakyChef3
I got to spend the morning with Amy of Living Locurto and I Heart Faces, Laurie of Tip Junkie, and Holly of BurbMom, plus several other bloggers at the Milestone Culinary Arts Center/Viking Cooking School in uptown Dallas. There we got to meet and get our hands dirty with Missy Chase Lapine, The Sneaky Chef, who teamed up with Uncle Ben’s as she showed us great ways to sneak vegetables and other wholesome foods into our kids’ favorite meals.

The Sneaky Chef
I got lots of great tips from The Sneaky Chef and I can’t wait to share them with you!

I had so much fun with these ladies!

SneakyChef3

On to other important items:

I’m really excited with how my garden is coming along! Yesterday, I got to harvest the first of my salad blend at the big garden. Last week, my lettuce was perhaps two inches tall…

This week it looked like this:

Garden Salad Blend
So I got out my knife and sliced my salad about one to two inches from the ground.

Garden Salad Blend II
I gained this trick from Dick Raymond who is the author of my favorite gardening book, Garden Way’s The Joy of Gardening. By giving my lettuce a haircut it is forced to send up new sprouts of tender young leaves, and in about three more weeks my lettuce and spinach will be ready to harvest again.

Although as soon as it gets done raining this morning I am getting the BT powder out and dusting it on my salad, because I found two caterpillars while I was washing it last night. Like Dick Raymond says in his book, there ain’t no worse feeling than finding caterpillars crawling on your plate.

Filed Under: Gardening, Reviews

Garden Plans for 2010

April 22, 2010 by Allie

GardenApril1

Fair warning: This is a really long post about my garden. Hopefully you’ll read something useful in it.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my goal this year is to have most of my fruits and all of my vegetables supplied to my family through a garden that my friend and I are working on together and also through my own garden and trees at home. I’ll be supplementing my fruits with wild grapes, blackberries, prickly pears, and more. The idea to make a garden of this magnitude began when my friend approached me and told me about the boxes of seed packets she had gotten for free. A mutual friend of ours is allowing us to till a portion of his land for us to plant our garden on, which also includes no cost well water to water the garden when the weather isn’t doing the job for us.

We first decided we needed a 60 foot wide by 40 foot long garden with walking paths. After my husband looked at our garden plot and saw all that he would have to till last year, we cut it back to three 40 foot long by 4 foot wide rows separated by two foot wide pathways. After retilling the garden this spring, my husband and I then divided the 40 foot long rows into three 40 foot long sections with water burrows to water the garden from the bottom for less evaporation when the heat of summer hits in about one month from now. Basically, we have about 480 square feet of garden to use between four adults and three children.

All leftover food from our garden that we don’t use immediately will be first canned, frozen or dried and used by us during the off season, and second given away. We’ve also thought about selling at the farmers market if we have enough, although I don’t think we will. Our mutual friend is welcome to take what he needs from our garden and the two other gardens planted by others on his property.

Since this is our first year gardening on this scale, we decided to plant traditional and easier garden plants such as tomatoes, cucumbers, various peppers, onions, squash, cantaloupe, watermelons, pole beans, a lettuce mix, beets, and three 20 foot long rows of sweet corn. We are also growing herbs such as dill, cilantro, basil, oregano, green onions, thyme, and sage. These herbs will act as insect detractors and pollinator attractors, as well as add flavor to our dishes at home. I’ve designated my three boys as our main source of insect control, well mostly because I can’t mentally handle caterpillars.

Right now our garden is just a little over two weeks old and so far everything has sprouted except a few of the tomatoes, the peppers, the cantaloupes and watermelon (these were planted later), and I believe one herb. To date, this is what our garden looks like:

GardenApril1

First 40 foot long section consisting of green onions, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, beets, and cilantro:

GardenApril8

Middle 40 foot section consisting of cantaloupe, pole beans, onions, herbs, jalapenos and our salad mix:

AprilGarden7

Third row planted with three 20 foot rows of sweet corn, a watermelon patch, basil and sage:

GardenApril6

When the idea came to plant corn this year, I was uncertain at first on how to plant it. My mother and stepfather moved to the Amarillo, Texas area when I was very young and helped raise corn and I remember snacking on fresh uncooked sweet corn as a child so I knew it was something I wanted to at least attempt. I know my kids will love picking their first ears of corn (and picking out any caterpillars therein), but where in the world did I start since I am not in contact with either my mother or my ex-stepdad?

So, I took my cue from the Native Americans of the American Southwest:

Illistration depicting Southwestern Native American planting corn

Which actually worked quite well. I poked a hole into the ground with a long stick, while my husband dropped a couple corn seeds into the hole and then my children followed and covered up the holes with dirt. We had 60 feet of corn planted in about ten minutes.

For now we are concentrating on keeping the soil moist while all the seeds germinate. When we tilled we amended the black clay soil with bone meal, bat guano (aka poop), and a small amount of wood ash. When the plants are little taller, I’ll be fertilizing with Miracle Grow which I have found works very well for North Texas in my own home garden. With a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work we’ll have a good harvest during the summer and fall. In fact, it’s not much at all right now, but hopefully in a month that will have all changed.

Y’all keep your fingers crossed for me.

Filed Under: Gardening

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