Full Backyard Garden Tour 2025

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Welcome to a homestead life. My name is Jen. I am super happy to show you around my garden today. We’re going to do a little garden tour of our main vegetable patch as well as my pot garden which is behind me. That’s where we grow a lot of our medicinals and culinary herbs. And we’re also going to take a little peek inside my little greenhouse and see what’s going on there. So, let’s get started. So, this is my pot garden. This is where all the medicine happens. So, in this first garden bed, I have a nice big old patch of lavender. Um, around the back, I have a bunch of holly hawks that’s just planted this year. They’re supposed to bloom in their first year, this particular variety, but I don’t know if they will because they had a little bit of trouble when I hardened them off. So, they’re starting to grow now. We’ll see how it goes. And I have a bunch of zucchini squash in the center, which we are starting to see some small zucchinis on. This second bed is pretty much all chenula and chamomile. So in this chamomile and colundula bed, it seems like the chundula must have selfseeded from last year because normally I plant colundula in one half of the bed and chamomile in the other. But in this particular bed this year, the chundula has pretty much taken over the entire bed. So it’s unfortunate because I really won’t have a lot of chamomile this year. We still have one jar, I think, from last year. So, we’re not too bad off, but I will have to keep that in mind for sure when I’m seeding next year. And I’m going to have to make sure I pick my seed heads off this year to make sure it doesn’t selfseed. So, otherwise, we have some sage and some thyme in this bed as well. In this particular bed, we’ve got a couple of new sage plants. This is a Hascap in the middle here, a couple of oregano plants. Over there, we’ve got a niece hissop. And over at the end, I have um a bunch of purple cone flour or echgonatia. This garden bed here behind me. Oh, we’ve got all sorts of things in this one. We’ve got um some time. I’ve got a couple of hascaps. There’s one over in the corner. I’ll show you. I put a bunch of sunflowers in the back. I’m trying to add a lot of beauty to the garden this year. This is an old um chive plant that’s gone to seed, so that’s no more good. the nice tall plant behind there, that’s BB bomb. I also have some straw flowers back there. This is my first year growing straw flowers. If you don’t know what straw flowers are, they are a flower that dries really, really well apparently. And you can, you know, use your dried flowers in arrangements in the house all winter really. Um, so that’s my plan. I’m hoping to get a bunch of nice straw flowers that I can dry and have a nice display in the house the winter. I also have some chundula in front and then a big old sage plant and a big old oregano and I’ve got a few chamomile next to that. So I’ll get probably get a little bit of chamomile but just not a lot which is sad. In the front here I have some arnica that’s newly planted this year. I planted that for medicinal purposes as well. Arnica is really good uh for pain relief. So I’m planning on infusing that in oil for my massage oil blend that I do um if I get arnica flowers. yet to be seen. Down here, I have some elderberry bushes still waiting to go into the ground. And I have some seed buckthornne that I started from seed. So, they’re actually doing pretty nice. So, I’m think I’m going to leave them in pots for the year and I’ll transplant these out next year. I’m not really sure yet. I haven’t decided. This bed here, I actually had greens and radishes in the spring. And when I took those out, I put some um summer squash seeds in. They’re a bit slow growing, but I think they’re finally starting to put some growth on. So, we’ll get some some squash from that this year. And I have nesters along the front here. And then this bed. Oh, we’ve got currant bushes in the back. We’ve got thyme. We’ve got some parsley. Got another sage, a purple sage in there. And just well, flowers and weeds. We’ll see how that goes. I got to clean that up. Back here, I have a massive amount of red currants ready to be harvested. I’ll probably just um pick these and actually freeze these currants and make jelly later with them. But yeah, this tree is actually loaded loaded with currants. And then in this bed, we’ve got a big oregano plant. If you haven’t noticed, I love herbs. This is something called Dyer’s chamomile. So, it’s actually a flower you can get a natural yellow dye from. We got a sage plant. We’ve got some flowers, couple of tomato plants. Got some more straw flour back there and a lemon bomb and just some more flowers and sage. Now, I will tell you, I’m bringing you around this garden, but there are an absurd amount of weeds right now. We actually had a really dry growing season this year. Like quite dry. Um, probably the driest we’ve had in my recollection. Um, but this past week we had 2 days of absolute downpours. And anybody that gardens knows what happens when it rains. The weeds just come out with a vengeance. So, when we get down to my vegetable garden, it is absolutely horrible with weeds right now. But, you know what? The vegetables are still growing. So that’s all that matters to me. I don’t really care to have a pristine garden. Um because gardening is a lot of work and our goal on our homestead is food production and herb production. So, you know, I’m okay with a few weeds. I am starting to put in some measures to help mitigate that, but right now weeding is on my list, very high on my list. So, when we get down to that, just keep that in mind that um yeah, there’s a lot of weeds. All right. So, behind me are our two tomato beds, our two main tomato beds. Um these are determinant tomatoes, mostly Manitoba and Oregon spring variety. Um yes, I just threw I should say we my husband and I just put some steaks in here to help hold them up. It’s kind of a funny story. I don’t know if you can see that. I’ll zoom in on it. We have a couple of tomato plants staked up with um arrows from one of our kids when he had a little bow and arrow set. Um yeah, funny story. The other day we one of these rainy days was um not what we expected. We thought it was just going to be a little bit of rain, but the winds came up really really high and it was just torrential downpour and you can picture it, right? So, I came out to take a look at my garden, of course, in one of the calm, like when the rain sort of settled for 5 minutes. And when I came out, all of my tomato plants, I hadn’t gotten them staked yet cuz they’re determinant. So, I thought I had a little bit of time. They were all practically like they were almost ready to crack off. So, I ran in, told my husband, I said, “We got to go out and stake our tomatoes because we’re going to lose them.” So, of course, we get dressed, come out, and the torrential rain comes down again. So, it is like pouring rain and we’re out here trying to find stakes, trying to find whatever we can basically to stake these up so that we don’t lose them in this storm. And we ran out of these uh bamboo stakes. So, my husband found a couple of arrows in the garage and we use those to stake it up. Desperate times calls for desperate measures, right? So, it was quite funny. All right. In this garden, we’ve got some sage in the middle. We’ve got a couple of big uh margarm plants. We’ve got savory and thyme. I’ve also got a big old lemon balm plant here that I actually harvested a lot from already. So, it’s kind of looking a bit ratty now. Here beside me and in behind me, this is all my hard neck garlic. It’s actually kind of looking kind of pitiful. That’s because of the lack of rain, this yellowing. I do water it, but um I guess not enough. There’s also a lot of weed pressure in here. I’ve been very negligent with my garlic. I really have been. But we’ll still get garlic. Like, I don’t know. I I try to do good at the start of the season with keeping the weeds under control in this bed. Um but it just gets away from me and it’s not really a major deal. We still get a beautiful garlic harvest. I’ve harvested the scapes off of this garlic um probably a couple weeks ago now. So, in another couple of weeks, it will be ready to pull up and uh cure for the year coming. All right, let’s take a little look at our main vegetable garden. So, the two garden beds behind me are winter squash. Um, I really tried to up my game this year as far as winter squash is concerned because last year it really didn’t grow well for whatever reason. Um, normally I get pretty decent winter squash, but last year was just one of those years. So, I’m really trying to redeem myself this year because I want a lot in my pantry for winter storage. Winter squash will actually last quite a long time if it is picked at the proper time when you go to harvest it. So, it is one of those things that I really, really like in my winter pantry. So, we’re stepping up our game. I actually have a third bed planted of winter squash as well. I’ll show you that as we go along. These two are just finally starting to put on some size. Like I said, we’ve had a really dry growing season. Um, I babyed these at the start of the season, like big time. If you notice, I have hoops over the beds. Um, I actually had plastic over the beds that I would put on at night for the first 3 weeks they were outside. our growing season, even though it’s a, you know, it’s a decently long growing season. I’m not sure of the exact number of days that it’s considered. Um, if I can figure that out, I’ll put it in the video. I’ll put it up on the screen, but we are in zone 5A, gardening zone. And early in the season, like we might have really warm days, but the nights really cool off. Um, sometimes like to 5 6° C. So things like tomatoes and squash and heat loving plants um I find do well with some sort of row cover early in the season whether it’s like a heavy cloth like a frost cloth like a remake cloth that’s thicker or uh in this case I had extra plastic from previous greenhouse builds so I use that and it worked like a charm. It was a lot of extra work but I don’t think my squash would have done well without that. So, um, now that our days and nights are really warming up nicely, it’s starting to put some growth on and we got a lot of female flowers starting. So, I think we’re going to have a good squash year this year. Down here in the pot, we just have some leftover potatoes. Um, I planted some potatoes in one of the garden beds and I had a few left over, so I threw them in the pot and I basically added soil as the plants grew, sort of hilled it up in the container. So, I’m hoping to get, you know, a decent feed out of that one container. We’ll see how that goes. but it didn’t cost me anything extra to plant it there. So, it’s a little experiment. So, behind me I have two fish pans. Um, one has carrot seeds in it and the other one has fennel. So, I have planted these carrots in this fish pan because my carrots in my regular bed didn’t germinate very well. It was very sporadic germination. Uh, same with my parsnip and my beets. I’ll show you that in a few minutes. But I had some old seed, three-year-old seed, and I decided to throw it in this fish pan. And wouldn’t you know, the seeds germinate in 5 days. So, there you go. I do have to water it, though. It looks a bit dry. The fish pan behind me is fennel. I’ve never grown fennel before. I’ve never eaten fennel. Um, it’s a brand new brand new to me. So, I think it’s growing really well. The bulbs are really bulbing out nicely. I’m really not sure at what stage I have to pick it. So, I have to do some research on that. If you know if you’ve eaten fennel or grown fennel, let me know in the comments when do I pick it. I’m thinking it’s getting pretty close cuz the bulbs are really starting to get a fair size. But, um I have to check that out cuz I’m not sure. So, behind me we have an onion bed. There’s onions and then leaks down at the end. Um these are all grown from seed and they’re doing fabulous. Now, there is an extreme amount of weed pressure in this bed right now, and onions don’t really like a lot of competition with weeds. So, I do have to get out here and weed desperately. Um, the weather today is actually, it’s beautiful, but it’s cooler than it has been. It’s been extremely hot here today. I think right now it’s only 15° C, so it’s just a beautiful day. So, I may come out and actually get some weeding done later on today. Um, yeah, down at the back I said there was leaks there. They are growing really well as well. This bed right behind me, I have tomatoes on this end. This is just some extra tomatoes that didn’t fit into my other beds. Um, there are a couple of determinant varieties in this batch though. Those were all or I mean indeterminant. Sorry. Those were all determinant. I do have a couple of indeterminants here. And behind that, I call that my little bed of soldiers. Um, that’s all bush beans. And I when I look at it, they’re all like just in line and standing straight up. I feel like it’s a little row of soldiers standing. I don’t know. It’s just what I call it. They are doing really well as well. Uh, we should get a lot of bush beans. That’s more than I actually usually plant. But I omitted a few things in my garden this year. I didn’t grow any brassas. We love brasacas. Love them. But we’ve got a pretty busy summer. We’ve got a son getting married. We’ve got one going off to college. We’ve got one coming home from college. Um, so we got a lot going on and growing brassacas in our area is nothing short of a nightmare. I got to be honest. You have to cover them uh with remake cloth or mesh or something like that. We have an extreme issue with the cabbage moth and also slugs. So sometimes no matter what you do, you still get your, you know, even if you cover your brassacas right from start to finish, those little buggers get in. Normally I don’t mind that, but I mean, normally I don’t mind dealing with it, but it is like a halftime job. Like seriously. Um I I really envy these people that I see on YouTube or places that don’t have an issue with cabbage moth. um because you know I see them with all their pristine brassacas and no row covers and stuff and I just can’t even imagine how wonderful that is. But um I’ll get back at that next year. But for this year I just I let it go. It was hard. It was really hard. I do have a few k Robbie put in there which is a brassica family. Um and I don’t have them covered. So we’re going to see how that goes. But I did it anyway. So, because I didn’t grow brasacas this year, I had some extra space and I just decided to put the extra winter squash in and the extra beans. Kind of get as much as I could from the space I have um by not doing the brassacas. Hope that makes sense. All right. So, this bed behind me looks pretty bare, right? This is what I call my bed of dread. So, this is where I had carrots and beets and parsnips growing and just really poor germination for whatever reason. Um, normally I plant a full bed of carrots and a full bed of parsnip, but I decided I had a bit of an issue last year with um carrot rustfly. So, again, I just sort of decided, you know, to taper that down a little bit. Um, I do still have a lot of frozen carrots and bottled carrots and stuff left from last year. So, you know, I wasn’t really, it wasn’t a major deal, but I still wanted, you know, a half a bed of carrots at least. So, there is some germination. It’s just very sporadic. I tried to add more seeds to it, but they didn’t really do well either. Um, I got a few beets coming up. That’s fine. I have like still quite a lot of bottled beets from last year as well, so that’ll probably just be fresh eating for us this year. down at the back, parsnip. So, I bought all fresh parsnip seed. I bought a different variety than I usually do, and I bought it from a company that I’ve used many times before, so I don’t really know what happened with my parsnips, but they did not germinate well at all. There’s very sporadic germination. So, but interesting funny story again. You know, if you’re big into gardening, you probably know that parsnip is one of those seeds that, you know, the pros and the experts recommend getting fresh seed every year because they don’t um the neighbor in there is yelling out to his dog. He’s got a new dog that he’s trying to train. So, I don’t know if you can hear that on camera. Um we have a pretty big property, but we, you know, we have almost 7 acres, but you know, we can still hear our neighbors a little bit, right? But they’re like-minded, so it’s all good. Um, so yeah, the parsnip, most people will say you have to have fresh parsnip every year, parsnip seed, because the viability doesn’t last. It’s not a longlasting uh seed. So fresh seed planted this year, poor poor germination. So, I had seed in the house that’s 3 years old, parsnip seed, and I decided, well, I have quite a bit of it, so I thought, why not? So, I just overseed it, um, my old parsnip seed, and wouldn’t you know it, it is germinating like crazy. So, I’m going to have to do a lot of thinning because in my mind, I thought, well, these parsnip seeds aren’t going to, you know, they probably have a 30% germination rate or something at this point, according to the experts. And so I, you know, I put quite a lot of seeds there, but they are just germinating like crazy. So kind of interesting. So really, you know, just a little tip, don’t totally pay attention to what the experts say as far as like shelf life of your seeds. Um, you can do simple germination testing as well. You can just put 10 seeds in a damp paper towel, put it in a bag and lay it aside for a few days and see how many germinates over, you know, the week or 10 days or whatever the normal germination time is for that particular seed. And if you have like five out of 10, that’s a 50% germination rate for that seed. Simple, simple test to do. So, yeah, don’t be throwing out your old seeds automatically because they’re old, cuz they might still be good. We have a little bed here that I just threw some red curry squash seeds in. Um, very late. They’re very small. Red curry is a fairly short season winter squash, so I think I’ll still get some winter squash from it. Um, I may have to row cover this in the fall to kind of extend the season a little bit. We’ll see. But if not, I do have two nice beds of winter squash, so I’ll get a lot no matter what. But I just decided to toss that in. Down at the end, I have a uh rhubarb plant that I just bought on clearance at a local nursery. So, it’s kind of it’s not the best looking, but I’m sure it’ll come back next year looking much better. Here I have a row of potatoes. Well, actually, it’s two rows of potatoes in one bed. I sort of mounted the soil into the center of the bed and planted along the sides. And then after a few weeks when the plants were, you know, probably a foot high, I pulled the soil back from the center to heal them up. So I did it a little bit different than a typical like hilling of potatoes, but it worked and they look like they’re thriving. The plants on the outside are thriving. I haven’t dug around to get any fresh potatoes yet. I’m kind of waiting and we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping I’ll get some decent potatoes this year. And right here I have another row of onions. So, these are onions that I also grew from seed. They were some of the worst looking ones, like the seedlings that I had left, but I decided to toss them in the ground anyway, and they’re actually not doing too bad. They’re not doing as good as the other bed. So, I’m not sure what I’ll get from this, but whatever. We’ll we’ll deal with what we get. If it’s just tiny onions, maybe we’ll do some pickled onions or something with that. And in front here, I have a handful of kabi plants. Now, these don’t really have any damage on them from the cabbage moth at this point that I can see. There’s a couple with like some minor damage. So, yeah, I’m shocked, but we’ll see. We may get some kabi out of that. And then back here, the last two beds, I have more onions. Those are from sets. They were my backups because I didn’t know how my seeds were going to go. Have a whole pile of volunteer potatoes there. And then along the back of this row, I actually have a bock. So, I’m growing that for the medicinal uh aspects of bock root. And in the back, we have a pile of comfrey. I actually um transferred my comfrey to this bed this year. It’s doing really well. I’m after harvesting quite a bit of comfrey from it already for medicinal purposes as well. Comfrey is really good for aches and pains, muscle aches, uh joint pain, that kind of thing. it. So, I dry the leaves and infuse it in an oil and I add it to a massage oil blend that I make. Um, in behind that, I have a few peas that aren’t doing great. This part of the garden is a little bit shaded from the birch trees and stuff in the back. I just really have an issue with cutting down birch trees because I absolutely love them. So, we may have We took one down. We may have to take another one down or two. We’ll see how it goes. But yeah, so this is pretty much our main food garden. Um, so like I said, there’s a lot of things I didn’t grow this year, but most of it is because of circumstances. We are looking at expanding our garden next year up into the little hill behind us and then kind of right here where the camera is at. Um, I’ll show you in a second. I’ll go back the other way and show you, but we’re planning on expanding up this way as well. We’re also looking at hopefully adding a high tunnel to the property next year. was supposed to be on this year’s list, but again, we’ve got so much on the go. Um, so, so yeah, so hopefully we will get things expanded here and really up our game, but I mean, our kids are sort of leaving the nest, so it’s, you know, in a couple years it’s only going to be myself and Lance, so we’re really not going to need, you know, major major amounts. Obviously, we’ll still share with our kids that are local, um, any produce if any of them stay local. We really don’t know what’s going to happen. So, I am still looking at expanding. I’m kind of thinking about getting into market gardening a little bit. Um maybe have a little farm stand. I’m not really sure. We’ll kind of see how that goes as well. So, see this is the garden we just came from. So, that’s sort of the hill I’m talking about. We might expand up into. Then, when you turn around here, this is the page. And then we have this old building here that’s coming down. So, we are going to expand our gardens up here as well. That was an old chicken coupe before we built our barn down there. All right. So, we’ll head down to my little greenhouse. I used to have two green houses down here, but we removed one. So, down behind me here, this is where our second greenhouse used to be. Um, I actually have some agriculture cloth put down there now. And I planted my elderberry cutings in there. I’m going to do another row in the front of this. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet because it has been so hot, but I’m probably going to do that this week. Over in the corner there, I actually have a horseradish that I planted this year from Root. It seems to be doing okay. So hopefully we’ll get some horseradish out of that. All right, so this is my little greenhouse. I just grow things in pots in here. Um, does anybody else go Does anybody else go into their greenhouse with a stick and sort of get rid of the spiderw webs before they walk through it? I do. I’m probably just a wimp. I’m really not a spider lover. I love gardening. I don’t mind most insects, but spiders are just one of those things that I really don’t like. So, yeah, I go into my greenhouse with a stick to get down all of the spiderw webs before I go in there. Usually, my husband waters the greenhouse, I got to be honest, but I do come in here quite a bit as well. So, in here for the most part is everything is in pots. It’s a pretty small greenhouse and actually it’s really starting to get shaded from the trees. Um, when we built this, the trees weren’t nearly as tall as they are now. And I guess we just didn’t anticipate it to be as shaded as it is, which is one of the reasons we’re also looking at getting a high tunnel. Um, this is not really serving our needs the way we need it to at this point because we’re in a cooler garden zone. things like hot peppers and sweet potatoes if we want to try those. They have to go in a greenhouse environment. Um so yeah, that’s what we’re looking at doing. So in here we have mostly um we’ll go through. So we have mostly hot peppers. We have some maragolds. So, I have like Hungarian hot wax. That’s actually throwing off a few peppers there. Now, we’ve got a lot of jalapenos, uh, black Hungarian or Czech black. We’ve got some Tulsi basil. I’m after harvesting quite a bit of that. Bit of rosemary. Down in the back, we’ve actually got three big pots of sweet potatoes, and it is growing amazingly. I grew these in my greenhouse a few years ago and got some small sweet potatoes, but I feel like we’re going to have more this year. Sweet potatoes is unfortunately not something that grows well in our area. So, we have them in like big giant pots and we’ll see how it goes. So, I have more hot peppers on the top of the other side. This is like a tower basil that I bought at a nursery this year. Got some more rosemary and some Tulsi jalapenos there. Sweet basil is pretty much gone to seed. Now, down on the bottom, I’m actually pretty excited about this as well. This is actually okra. So, I have a few of these plants. They’re like a miniature okra. It’s a hybrid. Okra is not something that grows where we’re at. I’ve never eaten it. I’ve never seen it, but I was dying to try it. So, I found these seeds and I planted them a bit late, but they’re actually the plants are doing really well. So, I really think we’re going to get okra. This is a cucumber. It’s a miniature one as well. It doesn’t need to be staked or anything. We’ve got lots of little cucumbers on it. This is just for pickling hopefully. And we’ve got some peppers there. Um there’s one pepper in here. I got a few of these plants actually. It’s doing really, really well. This is called shashito pepper. So I got this variety idea from Jess on Roots and Refuge and I wanted to give it a try. So, we’re trying it out. There’s another shashito pepper there. Really good for roasting, apparently. So, yeah, this is pretty much my greenhouse. Some things really aren’t doing that great because of the the shade, but like I said, those sweet potatoes are doing amazing. We’ll get quite a few hot peppers out of this little greenhouse as well. We really will. This little plant here, this is called Matchbox. So, it’s a little dwarf type hot pepper plant. There’s one little red one in there. So, this is a great plant actually to overwinter in your house for hot peppers. Doesn’t grow much bigger than this. A little bit bigger, but yeah. Well, that’s it for our little garden tour for today. Thanks for hanging out with me. I really appreciate it and I hope you enjoyed my little garden tour. It really is my happy place. I absolutely adore gardening. I think it’s just a wonderful hobby to have and it puts fresh food on our table all year round. So, there’s that, too. Right. We’ll be doing another garden tour later in the season and probably into the fall when we’re doing a lot more harvesting and food preservation, of course. So, feel free to subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss out on any of those upcoming videos. That is it for today. We will see you again on the next one. Take care. Bye.