Feeling at home

I love growing vegetables and tending plants. 

I don't like doing "tasks" in the garden, so my raised bed gardens and perennial beds have largely been free of most of that.  They require fun gardening:  planting, harvesting, shaping, and tending.  I enjoyed the exercise of digging in my Piedmont garden, but that's not the kind of garden I have here in the mountains.  My raised beds are full of lovely compost-rich soil, so simply need additional nutrients when changing out vegetables.  In recent years, much of the beds have been devoted to herbs, perennial and biennial, with cool-season veggies in spring and fall.

This post, on my sister gardening blog, Natural Gardening describes my cool-season veggie planting activities this afternoon.  Great fun.

A red-veined sorrel with a newly planted kale

The larger gardens that my gardening companion and I collaborate on;  well, he digs the holes, amends the soil, and puts plants in -- they're relatively low-maintenance after that, aside from watering for the first couple of years and in dry spells beyond.  We replace plants as needed, but happily they don't really require pruning, etc. like many ornamental shrubs from other places in the world.