Last week I showed everyone my pretty little square foot garden plot. We also had another garden this summer, so I thought it was only fair to show off my row garden too.
This garden was plowed by a very kind neighbor who was just itching to use his new tractor. It turned out a little larger than expected, but the Electronet fence fit around it, so we were good to go!
In this patch we planted 3 kinds of corn, Silver Queen, Stowell’s Evergreen, and Strawberry Popcorn. We also planted a variety of sunflowers, heirloom (non-GMO!!) edamame, beautiful dry calypso beans and Cosse Violetta Pole Beans, which turned out to be a wonderfully prolific and beautiful purple bean.
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| I know this is Eric and Lucas, but I almost can’t find Lucas at all! |
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| There he is! |
Once the corn was as high as an elephant’s eye, it was way too much for my camo-clad boys to resist!
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| Happy Corn! |
Some mornings the sounds of bees pollinating the corn was nearly deafening. We have a hive of honeybees in a tree in the backyard, who stayed very busy in the gardens this summer.
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| Can you see the bee in the center? |
The sunflowers were a ton of fun to watch grow too, as some soared to about 12′ high!
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| Bee on a Sunflower |
Some of the sunflowers were also doing double duty as extra support for the pole beans. I love that you get a glimpse of the red barn in the background of the last picture. It makes me smile.
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| Cosse Violetta Pole Beans |
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| Summer in a Basket |
I didn’t get a good picture of the purple beans on the vine, but I did capture them in a veggie basket that I auctioned off as a fundraiser for a friends’ adoption. Aren’t they pretty? Purple is my favorite color, so it was easy to choose the purple beans. They produced beans for almost 5 months, so I definitely plan to plant them again next year.
Oh, and in case the thought of eating purple beans is more than you can handle, they turn green when you cook them. On occasion I cooked these with green bush beans from the square foot gardens and you couldn’t tell the difference once they were cooked.
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| Dried Calypso Beans |
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| Also called “Orca” or “Ying Yang” beans for obvious reasons |
We haven’t eaten these calypso beans yet, partly because I am waiting until I have less produce coming in from the garden everyday, and partly because once I eat them I won’t be able to look at them!
Well, I hope you enjoyed the tour of our summer row garden! In some ways it was much more work than the Square Foot Garden
(oh the weeding!) in other ways it was easier (no building raised beds!)
What do you think, should we row, row, row our garden again next year or just stick with the raised beds?
