Garden 2026 is Upon Us!

Our Garden - July 25, 2026

We're back at it for another season! This is our 13th year gardening in this particular spot. (12th if you don't count the year I seeded all the beds in flowers and just let it go.) Over those years, I have realized one important thing: I'm a lazy gardener. I really enjoy gardening...every now and then when the mood strikes me. I wish I was a spend-time-in-the-garden-everyday type of gal, but I'm not. This revelation is a good thing! It has led me to plan this year's garden with my laziness in mind. 

Nearly everything in this year's garden is as close to "set it and forget it" as I could get. I planted summer and winter squash, pumpkins, beans (three kinds), corn, melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and garlic. I've weeded a couple of times, watered and fertilized, but overall I've only gone into the garden a couple times a week to look over its progress. 

Oh! I did plant radishes too and they turned out beautifully.

Most of the work on the garden was at the beginning of the season. Let's go back in time to the middle of May. Since I had no plans to plant hardy crops like chard, beets, or peas, there was no need to get out and clean up the garden any earlier. My general rule of thumb is to plant the garden on Memorial Day weekend. This year, since that fell on the earliest date possible, I actually waited until the next weekend. Back on May 10, however, I did go through and clear the garden beds of weeds and last year's detritus. I also repaired the upper extension of the garden fence. We added an extra four feet to the top of the fence last year in an effort to keep the deer out (click here to read about that). Over the winter, the wind and the weight of the snow broke many of the bamboo uprights, so I had to repair them in anticipation of this year's onslaught of deer.

The garden on May 10, ready for clearing and repairs.

Nearly three weeks later, I did the actual planting. Everything was from seed in the main garden. I did try to start some seeds indoors, but that was not as successful as in years past. That failure didn't effect me much, though, as I had not planned on transplanting anything into the garden beds in the first place. The first thing I did was dig into the compost bin. 

Mmmm compost!

Rather than add the compost broadly to all the beds, I targeted application to just where the seeds would be planted. I did a lot of digging, but it seemed like the most efficient thing to do.

Targeted composting.

Once that was all set, I put the seeds into the ground, watered them in, wished them luck ("Do your duty!"), took a picture, and walked away.

Not quite like walking away from an explosion. 

Over the next two weeks, all my little seeds started growing (except for one zucchini) and I occasionally pulled weeds to give them the best shot.

June 14

And two weeks after that, the little seedlings were bigger plants and I was weeding less.

June 29

A month after that, the garden is beautifully lush. The vegetable plants are easily out competing the weeds and we've started to harvest. After the radishes, our first fruits of the garden were patisson strie melange squash. The heirloom pattypan squash are fun and funky. They taste pretty good too.

They can be eaten as summer squash or left to become decorative gourds.

The tri-color garden beans have started to come in and we're on the verge of being overwhelmed by cucumbers (my favorite time of the year!).

Yesterday's haul.

My new favorite thing to grow is garlic. I had never considered planting it in the past. For some reason, I thought it was too complicated or too much work. But, in the fall of 2024, we planted garlic just to have scapes the next spring. We ended up actually getting a few bulbs of garlic. I replanted eight of the cloves last fall and all of them grew! We had a lovely, tiny side dish of scapes one night for dinner and, just this morning, I harvested eight beautiful bulbs. I only have a 50/50 idea of what variety of garlic it is. I originally planted two types. Only one grew and I don't know which one. But that's okay. I like the taste of it and really love how easy and effortless it is to grow.

The garlic bed at the end of May.

Yummy garlic scapes!

Garlic sharing its bed with the morning glories.

Look at those beautiful bulbs!

I think that's enough of a report for today. As always, I hope to actually write here more often. Perhaps I actually will this year since the garden itself is so little work! 

Golden zucchini

Honeynut squash

Picklebush cucumbers

Honeybees busy at work!

A couple of our resident lurkers.

My Un-Shaker Garden, Part 1

When I first built and laid out my vegetable garden six-ish years ago, I based it on the Shaker style. (Hence, the name of this blog). I love the look of gardens I have seen in person at Shaker historic sites and in photographs. I love the order and practicality of them, but primarily, I love the aesthetic. It is very un-Shaker to create something for beauty’s sake, but since the vegetable garden is functional, it gets to slide. Flowers, however, are right out!

Just a rose by the window. Nothing to see here.

The Shakers eschewed planting flowerbeds if there was no reason to have them beyond enjoying something lovely to look at. There was a loophole, however, when it came to medicinal gardens. If flowers were helpful then it was okay for them to look nice, as long as you didn’t admire them too much for their beauty. I have to say that when I intentionally created my first flowerbed here, I did not care if the plants could do anything more than be pretty.

When we first moved here, we found some flowers pushing their way through the junk piled on the east side of the garage. There were peonies, daylilies, irises, and a rose bush. I wondered why the previous owner had planted these perennials on the back side of the garage, as it was, when you cannot see them from the house. It turns out, that the plants enjoyed the spot, so why not add to them?

The "before" view with old pool pieces and a plastic pond we dug up.

I started planning my new flowerbed in the winter of 2015-2016. I bought seeds to start orange milkweed, lavender, red chrysanthemums, and pink and white Echinacea. The autumn before that, my husband found wild purple bee balm seeds in a field while working and brought them home. I started them too. So, in May 2016, I cleared off the abandoned flowerbed, and dug out some extra room for the seedlings.

All cleaned up and ready for more plants.

My precious little seedlings ready for their new home.

Once in the ground, my little plants didn’t look like much, but a couple months later they had filled in nicely.

August 2016 - They're settling in well!

Then the deer found the garden. We have a decent population of suburban deer in our neighborhood, as can be seen in quite a few of my previous posts here. Well, I never did get to see the chrysanthemums bloom as the plants got devoured long before they could even think of sending up buds. The Echinacea was chomped right down to the ground too. The lavender did well, and the orange milkweed went gang-busters. I’ve got lovely patches of it all around the property now. The wild bee balm also did very well; almost too well. I have learned to treat it with little mercy so it doesn’t take over the entire bed.

2017 - How lush!

I have kept the flowerbed up, more or less, over the last few years. I added a couple more plants that grew from a mixed packet of seeds I planted in a second flowerbed (more about that bed in My Un-Shaker Garden, Part 2, coming soon). Each year, the flowerbed is different and lovely.

The flowerbed got a bit neglected in 2018, but it still looked nice!

 I didn’t really have a reason to plant the bed in the first place other than wanting some pretty flowers, but it has turned out to be a favorite spot for bees and butterflies. Its success in bringing in the pollinators inspired me to plant a second bed, right next to the vegetable garden. (Again, read all about it in Part 2.)

A bee in the bee balm. Makes sense.

I haven’t had a chance to get out and clean up the garage flowerbed yet this year. I was going to do it on a nice day about a week ago, but a dead tree is looming over it caught upon a mostly dead tree, and the windiness of the day made it feel unsafe to be there. I will get to it though, and maybe see what new flowers I would like to add this year.

Grandma always liked the orange milkweed, but it didn't grow that well on the mountain. I wish I could share it with her now.

The Wait is Over

For a couple of weeks, we’ve been tending the garden and waiting for the next round of vegetables. Well, they have arrived. A week ago I picked two yellow squash and one zucchini. They were all a little on the small side compared to when we usually pick but I was running out of patience. I sliced them in half the long way and cooked them with just a little oil, salt and pepper and they were fantastic.

A handful of summer squash

It always amazes me how quickly some vegetables go to just about ready to pick to how they heck did they get so big already. Just four days after the first runt squash, we picked two more yellow squash and three zucchini that were just on the edge of being oversized. Then three days after that there are three more zucchini. I really like summer squash – I would not have planted six of them if I didn’t – so this is not a hardship. I’m glad that we’re actually getting so much from the plants this year. Last year we only got a couple squash before the plants quit. The yellow squash never even really got started.

Cukes and Zukes

We’re also starting to get cucumbers. There are only a few big enough to pick so far but there appear to be more on the way. We decided to try to get them to climb this year. We got our hands on some wooden stakes to reuse so we figured we’d give it a try. They are not stellar climbers on their own but once trained seem to be getting the hang of it.

Climbing cucumbers

I was happy to find that the first cucumbers were not bitter. It has been so hot this summer that I worried that they would turn on us like last year. Maybe they are doing okay because it has been consistently hot. Last year the cucumbers went bitter because a sudden spike in temperature stressed them out. Hopefully, they’ll hold their sweetness this year.

Just one of many tiny cucumbers

The heat has not been the only thing making this year’s growing season so different from last year. We haven’t seen any significant rain in weeks, now. The lawn is brown and crunch so there’s been no need to mow for quite a while. We had been leaving the back lawn mostly un-mowed anyway. My husband’s idea was that if we leave the clover and wildflowers in the backyard, they would attract bees. When they were finished blooming, the bees would turn to the garden. My husband is a brilliant man. Now that the clover is brown, the bees are busily working over all the blossoms in the garden.

Because of the lack of rain, we’ve had to water the garden on a regular basis. This has actually turned out to be a good thing. We can make sure the garden is consistently hydrated and fertilize on a regular schedule.

All the veggies get a drink

While this year has been dry, last year was overly wet. The constant rains fostered a fungus on my chard and beets. (click here for details) This year, I chose another bed for the plants, hoping to stop the cycle. Well, that worked but I have a new problem – leaf miners. These nasty little worms burrow into the leaves and eat them from the inside out. I did some research and found that there was little that could be done once the worms were hatched beyond cutting off the infected leaves.

Yuck! Leaf miners.

I did find, however, that with a little effort, I could prevent the worms from being on the leaves in the first place. It’s a fly that lays the eggs, so if you can keep the flies off the plants they can’t lay the eggs. I didn’t really want to engineer a barrier to I decided to tackle the problem post-fly. The fly lays the eggs on the undersides of the leaves so all you have to do is flip over each leaf, find the eggs, and brush them off. My chard bed is very small so this is a perfectly reasonable chore. Every couple of days I inspect the chard, brush off eggs, and cut off infected leaves and I think I’ve gotten ahead of the problem.

Teeny-tiny eggs

Chard all bright and lovely

There are a lot more plants in the garden just on the edge of being ready to pick. A quick rundown: the green beans are flowering like crazy and have put on small beanlets that will be ready to pick before we know it; the tomato plants are covered in small green tomatoes on the verge of blushing; we have a few peppers that are about the size of golf balls; and the pumpkins and acorn squash have tiny little fruits started. I feel we’re just on the cusp of a very busy veggie season.

Tomatoes

Pepper

Cantaloupe vines

Pumpkin

Green beanlet

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like…Springtime?

So, it’s the 15^th of December and honeybees are still working over the flowers on the lettuce in the garden. The temperature was at a record high yesterday. I was actually able to pick some fresh herbs from the garden for dinner last night. This doesn’t feel right to me. This is New York State. It doesn’t even feel like just an extended autumn. The warmth and the rain and the smell of the air all remind me of springtime. Strange. At least I got to enjoy the bees, though they seemed rather frantic.

Usually by this time of year nearly all insect life outside is dead or asleep. I’m not used to seeing so many tiny creatures still active.