Spring Garden Tour & Plans | Raspberry Trellis, Deer Fence & Family Gardening (Nova Scotia)

Come along for a spring evening garden tour as I walk through our shared family garden in Nova Scotia and talk about what’s taking shape in this early part of the growing season.

In this video, you’ll see:

– Seed starting setup indoors on the dining room table

– Redesign plans for my perennial bed

– Intentions for new medicinal herb beds

– How we’ve fenced the garden to keep out deer

– Our overall garden layout and evolving planting plans

– A look at our garlic, greens, herbs, and flower beds

– The new raspberry trellis I built with my dad

– What it’s like to co-garden as a family on a (not quite) homestead

– My schemes for beauty and food production in the garden

This is a real-time, real-life look at how our garden grows—and how it shifts through life and calendar seasons.

#GardeningInCanada #SpringGardenTour #GardenPlans #SeedStarting #MedicinalHerbs #KitchenGarden #PerennialGarden #FamilyGardening #FamilyGarden #HomesteadGarden #NotQuiteHomestead #SmallScaleHomesteading #Zone6B #DeerProofGarden #SharedGarden #RaspberryTrellis #DIYGardenProjects

Hi there. I’m Renee. Tonight I’m going to give you a garden tour. We could call this the early spring, end of early spring, coming into midspring tour. And if you want to have more context for my early mid late spring designations, you can watch the video previous to this one, which is all about early spring happenings. And I talk there about how in Nova Scotia, we just have a long spring. Where we are at right now is I feel like early spring is wrapping up and we’re in midspring, early midspring. And there’s a lot going on with gardening and that’s what I want to give you a tour of tonight. I have a shared vegetable. There’s also some fruits and there’ll be flowers. It’s a large garden. I’m going to show you it. I have a shared garden space with my parents or I should say we my husband and I have a shared garden space with my parents though it’s largely going to be um my mom and myself who do the planting and the weeding and the harvesting. Um so I’m going to show you that and I also have a perennial bed next to my house. Perennial bed uh has been established by my parents by my mom in the years of living in this house which is 14 years that my parents have been living here. And so I am building off of the base and the foundation that they already established, which is huge. Saves me so much work and effort. And they’ve built up the soil, which is really important where I live here in Nova Scotia. So I am benefiting from the work, time, resources, energy, effort, all these things that my parents have already put into the gardens. And then I’m going to build on it and expand and bring some of my own vision and ideas to life. And what’s really amazing is that um in terms of the execution of these ideas, I have my parents to help me. And I don’t need a lot of help executing ideas in like my perennial bed, but certainly in the vegetable garden or the kitchen garden. I’m not entirely sure what to call it because it’s certainly more than vegetables. You’ll see that shortly. But in that garden, um, I have their help, which is significant. And I have help with the infrastructure building. I’m going to show you the raspberry trellis that my dad and I built. It’s just um really amazing to have this shared resource, shared project uh gardening together with my parents and pooling our efforts, resources, energy efforts to make something greater than what we could make on our own. Certainly, it is greater than what I could do on my own. And uh so I’m really grateful for what I have going on here. And I’m going to take you on a tour tonight. It’s tonight when I’m filming and uh the sun is setting behind me here in the west. So, I’m going to take you on a tour of where everything is at right now with the gardens. It will be interesting to revisit the gardens with you later in this growing season. I’m not sure if I’ll do another video quite like this one where I do a whole tour through the gardens or just show you bits and pieces. I really don’t know how that will look. But for tonight, I’m going to give you a comprehensive tour of what’s happening in the gardens. Um everything from my seed planting that’s going on, seed starting indoors to what’s happening in the perennial beds and some ideas I have for there. and then what’s happening in the vegetable/kitchen garden shared garden space with my parents. So, let’s go check that out. I’m going to start this garden tour for you indoors because I am starting seeds this year. At various points in the past, I have done small amounts of seed starting like maybe one packet of seeds that I did for funsies or that I was doing with the kids as part of their um homeschooling or just you know gardening enjoyment. My seed starting indoors has been very limited. this year. It is not very extensive, but it’s more than what I’ve done in the past. And it’s kind of like dipping my toe into um the world of seed starting and learning what I need to do it and to do it well and to get my seeds to germinate and all that. Um but I’m using very simple um supplies and tools. I don’t have grow lights, you know, I’m just using these windows here, but I can’t control the temperature. maybe the way that I really should. You know, I’m just saying basically this is a simple setup that I have going here. But my goals for the future years are to do more intense seed starting indoors. At least that’s what I have in mind now. You know, I might try it and be like, “Yeah, this isn’t for me.” But I have a suspicion I will pursue it more than what I have in the past. Especially with flowers. I love flowers and getting them started indoors just allows me to have so many more of them, right? It’s just a a um a cheaper way certainly to get flowers into the garden. Okay, so let me just show you what I’ve got going on here. Here are my seeds indoors right now. I actually have you can see outdoors. I also have some things out there. I’ll take you there shortly. Okay, these plants here are what I was starting in the spring happenings video or the early spring happenings video that I previously posted to YouTube. These are zenyas and I uppotted them today which means I took them from smaller containers and gave them more space. They will probably need to be uppotted again. I wanted to show you this container and this little seedling here especially. See that little those little green ones? This is my inula. So, this is pretty amazing because if you watched that other video of mine, I cold stratified these seeds by putting them in the freezer, which is not a highly recommended practice. I don’t know that there’s uh recommendations like against it or warnings against it, but cold startifying generally you use the fridge. But this one was successful and I’m so happy. I just have to show you that because that was a bit of an unknown from my seed starting. These are the ones that I am still waiting on to germinate. These are all flowers, um, milkweed and some various other things here. These are all uh, maragolds that were old seed. I thought, well, let’s just give them a try. These aren’t cold stratified. These ones were cold stratified and they’re not germinating yet. And these ones I just planted today. And these are all sunflowers of different types, different varieties. So, I keep things under plastic until they have germinated. Uh cuz I think that’s what I’m supposed to do. Honestly, I’m still learning. There’s so much that I don’t know. So, these are under plastic to I think for the moisture is what the idea is mostly. This is what is indoors right now for gardening. And my dining room table is is kind of the place where a lot of gardening action happens. The dining room table is definitely part of the gardening process and is in various stages of mess and disarray and dirtiness and then it gets cleaned up and tidied and then I get things out again. Anyways, here is my garden map. We’ll be going out there shortly. And then I have my some of my supplies over here. None of this feels especially dialed in yet. I’m still working out systems as it’s just my first time doing this. So, okay, that is what’s happening indoors for gardening. It’s basically happening here. And now, let’s head outdoors. So, I was showing you the marolds inside. This is pretty funny. Marolds were on sale this week at one of the nurseries that I regularly visit and they were a really good price and my mom likes putting marolds in pots. I’m going to be putting marolds in the large garden and it was just a great deal to get them so I got them. But it’s way too early to be putting them out. And so I will now be babying these marolds for the next month at least in out in out. And it’s kind of getting chilly tonight. So I’m going to take them in soon. And I see that these ones need to be deadheaded. So that’s why there’s marolds. And honestly to have this burst of color out here and even inside is a nice treat this time of year. And here are the other seedlings that I haven’t got around to uppotting yet. These are all uh zenyas. Actually, these are holly hawks and the rest are zenyas. And you can see they’re starting to get crowded in my tofu containers. That’s what I that’s what I seated things in. Tofu, reused tofu. And these are mushrooms, which are a bit deeper. This mushroom container is a bit deeper. I will be putting those into bigger pots and I’ll probably still have to upot them one more time. I’m very excited about these zenyas. I love zenyas. Here is the perennial bed. So, I have a lot of vision for this space. I will be using the plants that are in here, but some of them I’m going to move out of here entirely. For example, the yrow. There’s quite a bit of yuro and it’s getting weedy as yuro certain varieties do. I just want to take it out of here entirely. My overall vision for this space is to build a perennial bed that has gradations in height. So, I want to have lower height um plants at at the edges all around the edges and then have the height of the plants build to the middle. And that middle spot is actually where the yrow is right now. I Let’s get closer. I’ll show you. You know what I’m talking about. Here is the yrow. Okay, that spot is my middle. And I already have some very tall uh plants in here that I’m going to move. For example, this dilly here. It’s very tall, and I don’t want such a tall plant closer to the edge. So, I’m going to be moving it to the middle. That is the kind of changes I will be making in this bed. So, moving things around as well as adding other plants that I really love um and enjoy. And the other thing I’m learning is how to manage deer. So, and other critters that eat things. So, I used to live in the city and I didn’t have to contend with those things, but this was eaten down by, I think, deer. I don’t know, rabbits, porcupines, I don’t know exactly, but I got a spray that’s non-toxic, but it’s like this smelly spray that deters animals. It’s called Bobex. And I’ve sprayed it on things to deter animals from this bed because, as you can see, this bed does not have a fence. There’s nothing here to stop animals from coming in and munching. The other thing I am dealing with at this time of year, I’m trying to catch uh bugs as they come. So, I get these little red beetles on these. I think these are also a kind of lily. A um so we’ve got the day lilies, but the other kind of lily, I think that’s what these are. And there’s these little red beetles that eat them. And I’m trying to catch them and kill them. So that’s what’s going on with this. I absolutely love having such a large perennial bed, but it’s already feeling too small. It’s like it just seems to be never enough garden space. So, my vision for this area, first of all, I’m not really into shrubs. They’re nice for the structure, I guess, during the non-flowering season, but I just really like flowers. So, I’ll be taking out these woody shrubs. And then the other things that will be coming out of here are more of my medicinal herbs. There are some medicinal herbs in here. I have a bunch of lemon balm. And you know, this container helps keep it contained, but then there’s lemon balm throughout other places here that needs to come out. my vision for medicinal herbs, the things that I make certain herbal remedies out of, but also tea. So, not culinary herbs, uh, which I would distinguish as things that I cook with. So, you know, thyme, mint, dill, basil, rosemary, those things I think of as culinary herbs. And then medicinal herbs would be lemon balm, yrow, the uh inula that I have seeding inside. I also will be doing holy basil. So I have some things that come to mind, but there’s a lot of other ones that I’ve just missed in the recollection on video. Anyways, uh I consider those or I categorize those as my medicinal herbs and I don’t really want them in this perennial bed just for kind of organizational purposes and also sometimes those uh plants they have more of a spreading habit and I want them to be able to do that and just kind of kind of take over a space but that’s not in my perennial bed. So my plan for that is for the area behind me here. got something started out here. So, I have to build it up because obviously you can see there is no beds here to work with. So, I have something started here already. This is going to be common milkeed and I planted it last fall so that it would um go through the natural process of overwintering which the seed likes to do. Alternately, you can cold stratify, which is what I’ve done indoors with the mem. Um, in either case, I have not yet seen any uh germination. So, I’m still waiting to see that. But my idea here is that I will extend this bed that I started into a larger circular or kidney shape or just some kind of rounded edged bed or multiple beds that I will do medicinal herbs in and other things that I just don’t want taking over my perennial bed. So that is the vision for this part. And so this is beds to be built. We could call it um things I want to build. And that’s what I would like to build here. I also have a vision for this front yard to put in raised beds when I want to extend my growing capacity in that garden, which is where I’m going to take you next. This area would be fabulous for raised beds because it gets the most sun in on the whole property. This is southern exposure and it doesn’t have the shading that those trees give at the end of the day to that garden. And so I think this would be a great garden space. So this is my like the visionary part of the video, the like what I imagine for the future. It’ll be interesting and fun to look back on this and see how things have changed as I garden here. [Music] [Applause] I’m dressed a little warmer. It is a chilly evening. Let’s go take a look at the shared garden with my parents. First of all, what you’ll notice is there is a fence. It still needs a little bit of reinforcements like here where it’s kind of sagging around the corners. It was hard to get it to go tight. Other than a few of those spots, it’s I think going to be sufficient to the task we have for it, which is to keep deer out. And uh my parents used to have uh an electric fence here. They had that working for a few years. And because of that, the deer got trained to not go into this space. And last year, the electric fence wasn’t operational at all. But deer never went into this space. But I do think that luck will run out in terms of the deer permanently staying away. Well, hello Mr. Robin or Mrs. Robin. I figured eventually our luck would run out with the deer being conditioned and programmed from previous years that there’s an electric fence here. Some generation of deer comes along and they’ve never experienced electric fence and they’re like, “This looks like a great place to eat.” So, we really did need to fence it again. And so, that’s what we’ve done here. It is not a like super duper 20ear durable fence. I’m hoping we’ll get five years out of this. Uh, we will see. We don’t get a lot of snow here, and snow is what damages these the most, I think, based on the research I’ve done. We’ll see. It’s what we could afford this year, and what we could set up like in time to get things planted. We didn’t have a lot of time or funds to do a huge fencing project. So, it is what it is, and I think it’ll be good enough for now. and Damian engineered all these clips for um getting in and out and for locking it up. So, I’m just going to open it up and take you inside. Okay, so the door is open. The door, if you can call this the door, the uh the flap is open. This is one of the openings. The opening is wide enough to bring in a wheelbarrow. Let’s just kind of go through um not row by row, but section by section. This section here is going to be sunflowers and I’ve started them by seed indoors. And then zenas are going to be in here. This is a chundula from last year. So the chundula plants those are annuals but they recede and I will pull that out when I go to plant the zenas. These are milkeed and we have them for their beauty, but also for the uh monarch butterflies. Oh, I spy. It’s like an ice spy game. I spy four. Yay. Okay, so we’ve got the swan. We’ve got that one. And we’ve got this one that’s just like eaten all through the here. Got this one that’s eaten all through the foliage that’s available on that stock. Have to go down a little bit, buddy. And that one. So, the patch is doing pretty good for supporting the larvae. That’s all I see. I have some things planned for this front corner. I’d have to check my notes. Perhaps bachelor buttons. Uh I think I’m going to do holy basil in here. This comry is going to come out and move to a different place. But basically along here is the we’re going to have this long row double row of sunflowers. That robin just wants to be heard and I want to give it some attention. Okay. So, that’s what’s in this area. Right in here will be a path, I believe. So, I’ll just walk it now back to this eastern edge. No, western edge. This is the western edge. Okay. So, then in this section here is various vegetables and they’re going to be in rows. And we already have a row started there with onions that my mom has planted today. And that’s I had I had marked for her onions to go here. And then this says path, but um yeah, this actually will be a path right here. And then there will be four I think four rows of different vegetables here. And I haven’t got them all staked out yet because I haven’t planted them yet. So that will be vegetables in there. And I can’t recall off the top of my head what all we’ve got planned for here, but certainly I’ll have some tomatoes. There will be um cuces on frames or on cages to go vertically. Uh what else? I have to put some carrots in. My mom likes green beans. I like green beans, too. Um so that’s that’ll be a lot. That’ll be a lot for this space. So, I might have to find some some other spaces for some of those things. So, along here, this is a fairly wide space, but I will be doing and here’s the idea. Uh, we’ll see how successful it is. I want to keep this section open. You know, we just need access here, but starting at this uh I’m going to say rod, but I feel like it’s not a rod. starting at this stake um that metal stake and going to the other one the next one I want to do morning glories and they will then be able to use this to vine up and I want colundula at the base that will significantly cut back on the pathway here so that the path will just be in this area colundula I use that for a medicinal herb so this is why when I talk about like creating you know medicinal herb space in the front there. It’s fluid and it’s not everything’s not set in a particular space. It’s kind of also based on the aesthetic and I definitely like chundula in the garden also because it is not a perennial. It’s easy enough to uproot and get out of the space if you decide you don’t want it there. I think that’ll be a good addition at this end of the the western edge of the garden. This fence here uh is set up for sweet peas. So, we’ve planted sweet peas. I can’t remember on which side. Oh, is this one germinating? Let’s see. Oh, I think that’s that’s a sweet pea germinating right there. See if you can I don’t know if it’ll focus, but I believe it’s starting to germinate. Oh, wonderful. So, those are going to be sweet peas. And here we have our garlic. We have attempted to plant enough garlic for our two households and enough for to seed our garlic for next year. So I did calculations for all of that uh last fall when we went to plant the garlic. We’ll see if the yield will be sufficient for our household needs for a year and for seeding for next year. That’s what the goal is to be self-sufficient in garlic, which is a doable thing. So many other crops require preservation and require uh a lot of effort to save them and to keep them. And garlic does not. And it produces well here. And so this is my only self-sufficiency goal right now is garlic. So this is our garlic. Uh this will be a path here. Mom put onions in here today. This is going to be a little path and um connecting to this area. We can’t do anything around here because we have this infrastructure, you know, we’ve got the hose and those cement blocks and this is the other uh doorway, other access point into the garden. Uh I’m not sure how much of this like setup, you know, I’ll keep for future years. Everything is evolving, right? But definitely this is where our water source comes into the garden. And we have an elderberry here. And we love our elderberry. So, uh, we need to keep some space here for those things. But, you know, there’s a lot of space then that doesn’t get used for growing because we have to be able to manage around this and to be able to use that. So, I have a little section planned here to put plants in there. I think I’m going to do lettucees. Walking down the This is the eastern side. This will be path here. And I’m going to put marolds along the fence here. You saw all the marolds earlier. This is where they are going to go next to the garlic. I just planted we have spinach. Uh let’s see. We’ve got kale, spinach, and arugula. That plant was that got planted in here. So, this is an area of the garden that vexes me a little bit because we have trees that have been here for a while. It’s still TBD or to be determined whether they’re going to stay here. Uh, this is a hawthorne. Uh, hawthorns are cool trees for a lot of reasons, but I’m not sure that this is the place for it. And then there’s a tree there, and I don’t know what it is. and this section here of grass which is in the fenced in area because it just was still easiest to fence in this whole area instead of um jogging it over and excluding that. Eventually that might be um tilled up soil and planting putting things there, but I have to decide what we’re doing with these trees and we’re not I’m not sure yet. Uh we have some things planted here. So, I have some bush peas and mom actually transplanted some chard. Chard here is a perennial basically. So, we moved some chard here. Oh, mom’s got some I think more onions there. Shallots there. We have vining peas here. I just planted them yesterday against that fencing material. I don’t know what that is. I found it in the woods behind our shed was some castoff from some project. So I feel like I’m just going to back up here and talk about this space. This is a strange kind of setup. Not sure how this will evolve through the years. We also have this elderberry here. So there’s two elderberry, but both of our households use elderberry. Um, we make elderberry syrup and tincture out of it and it’s a great plant to have for medicinal purposes. So, we definitely want to keep the elderberry here. But, this is not like a garden that was um conceived and and planted out in a typical kind of like um got these rows here, then this row row row. So, this is just the way it has evolved to this point, and we’ll see how it grows and changes throughout the seasons, but this is how it is shaping up for this season. Very excited to get things in here, but of course, it’s still early. It’s um we’re only at the end of April right now, so I can’t do too much in here. And now I’m going to show you the largest and latest infrastructure project in the garden, which is our raspberry trelluses that my dad and I built just this week, and they take up a lot of garden real estate. The raspberries take up a lot of space. My parents planted these raspberries years ago, and raspberries can become very prolific in areas, and uh they, you know, send out their runners and send up new canes. so they can establish themselves really well. And this is the area that they established themselves in. And I just kind of went with it. I was like, “Here they are. Let’s let them be here.” But we had to in that process of building these trelluses, we had to remove some other things cuz there was uh some little boxwood shrubs at the end of this frame here. Um and I wanted to actually have the raspberries run all the way down. My parents through the years in this garden space, they have put in uh some shrubs and trees to fill in the space and to make it less intense gardening work for them. Like they want to grow some things and tend some things, but they don’t want to have a full garden uh space where, you know, it’s just soil that’s waiting there that needs to be planted and tended and harvested. Uh they wanted to simplify their gardening and yard work. So, they planted these trees um and some shrubs in here to uh basically landscape it, right? But I really want garden space, especially since there are well two of us definitely working this space up to four at some times in terms of helping with the infrastructure building. Uh my husband built the fence u my dad helped build the trellis frame and he’s up for helping build other things. So we have lots of co- lababorers in the garden and so we can certainly plant out more things and we can manage it in moving here and starting to manage the garden space. I am envisioning us planting more things here, more vegetables, more herbs, more plants that need to be managed intended than what my parents were doing in previous years as they were kind of scaling back their uh investments into this part of the yard. So, I plan to uh grow more things and extend things. And so, we’ll see how that plays out in this this particular fenced in garden space. But for now, this is how it is. And gardens are spaces that are always evolving, right? They we well, at least for me, they’ve always been evolving spaces. You try things and uh you learn things and you learn what you like and what you don’t like and what grows well there and what doesn’t. And yeah, what are satisfying things to grow and what are just ownorous or no longer want to do. So anyways, that’s the kind of stage that we are in with this garden is figuring things out and experimenting and also just enjoying our labors together in this space. Enjoying being together, working together. It’s a real treat. Okay, so I’m going to show you these uh raspberry trelluses. Now, I researched this design in uh perhaps Pinterest, but YouTube uh watched a YouTube video on building a frame like this, which doesn’t take up too many materials. And certainly my dad made quick work of sawing up larger pieces of wood into these narrower kind of square uh shaped stakes. So, we have four of them along uh the length here. And then the raspberries are in them. And these wires uh will keep the raspberries like behind the canes behind. So it just keeps everything controlled so that we’re not having canes falling over on us and like that we’re like basically having to move through a jungle of raspberries, which is what it has gotten to be in here. So, this area we had some shrubs um that we had dug out by our friend and I transplanted these canes over here. We’ll see how they do. They’re looking pretty good right now and we’re getting more rain this weekend. So, I’m hoping they’ll get established. So, that is one row. And then we have a second row here with roughly the same amount of canes in it. So, that’s our our raspberries. And they are a significant portion of this fenced in garden space for sure. And then here we are over on the nicest grass in the entire yard. Don’t know what it is about this space, but it produces the lushest grass that we have on the property, which feels ironic cuz we’re not over here like enjoying it. Um, like I said earlier, this may come out. I just really don’t know what to do about these trees. They’re still in their kind of probationary period with me as I’m assessing how I want to use this space and how the trees fit into that or don’t. It feels like some of this is wasted space, but of course, you know, this is going to leaf out. It’s a little tree, so, you know, there’s just shade under there. Although, we found that the comfry does really well under there. And I’m going to move um another comfrey plant to underneath this elderberry. So that is the tour of the garden. And these uh these wooden boards with markings on them are just as I am building out the garden to kind of mark things for other people that walk in here, mostly mom. Um just to say this is where I’m envisioning a path, uh you know, so let’s keep walking here or this is where I’m envisioning doing plants. So, we’ll try not to walk in there too much right now. Although, I’ll have to dig it all up before planting in there. So, that is the tour of this garden space, which you can see why I’m not sure what to call it. It’s let’s call it the fenced garden. I guess this is the fenced garden space. I am very excited to be working out here this uh spring and summer and to see how things grow and to have a space that is both uh functional in terms of growing some food that we like to eat and beautiful. That’s really important to me that it is also beautiful. A garden this size will not produce preservation quantities of things except for the garlic and actually raspberries. We will be able to freeze raspberries, but we also like to just eat a lot in the during the summer or the growing season. Uh those raspberry canes will produce in the fall. love experimenting with it and getting my hands dirty and growing food and making beautiful spaces. So, that’s what we’re all about here. That’s what we’re doing. And um just to be able to walk in and cut stuff that you can use in your meals that day and for snacking and um adding food to the summer table and the fall table. That’s the vision for this space. Okay. So, I’ll close up the garden now. I am excited about uh keeping you updated on the garden’s progress and through this growing season and even in seasons to come and to see how the space evolves and changes and all the different plants that I will be growing here. Thanks for watching.