- Hi, I'm Megan from "The Creative Vegetable Gardener"
and today, we're going to talk about
design inspiration for a creative vegetable gardener.
So I live in Madison, Wisconsin
and because I teach gardening and I have a large garden,
a lot of people assume that I grew up on a farm,
but I actually grew up on the opposite of a farm,
which was a row home in Philadelphia.
So I didn't know anybody that had a garden,
we didn't have a yard.
I actually didn't even really know that growing food
was something that people did in their free time.
I was definitely an urban person.
So a few years ago, I emailed my mom and I said,
"I know that we had a yard for a very short amount of time
at one of the houses that we lived in when I was young."
I said, "Can you look through the photo albums
and send me a picture of me in the garden?"
And this is what she found and sent me,
a me with a picture of an azalea bush,
which I thought was really funny.
That was the extent of my gardening.
And she sent me this great note.
"Here are the only photos I have
"where you are even near a plant.
"Apparently after your sixth birthday,
"we never let you near another flower or garden.
"I can only plead that we are city folk
"and always have been.
"We have plenty of photos of you on concrete.
Love Mama, Queen of the Concrete Jungle."
So when she sent me this note,
I thought, "I have to put that into one of my talks,"
because it really illustrates
that I come from a very urban family,
not a farming family, like a of people in Wisconsin.
So then after college in Philadelphia,
I moved to San Francisco.
And while I was in San Francisco, I started to think,
"I kind of wanna learn how to grow food."
Looking back, I have no idea where those thoughts came from.
I can only chalk it up to living in California.
Sometimes strange things happen to your brain.
So I applied for an internship in a small town in Missouri
and ended up getting accepted.
And so I went and moved to a farm
in a town of a hundred people in northeast Missouri.
So from Philadelphia to San Francisco to northeast Missouri.
It was a big shock, to say the least.
I had no idea how to live on a farm,
no idea how to live in a rural area.
It was very stressful for those first few weeks,
but things really started to look up
when I met this guy, [chuckling]
who is now my husband.
I love this picture because it shows
that he's trying to get into the farm,
Missouri farm guy vibe.
He looks very different now; he is a business owner.
His hair is cut, doesn't really wear overalls,
but I love this picture.
So things were really looking up
when I met Mark, and we ended up shacking up
in this tiny little square foot, 90-square-foot cabin.
So often I say that we lived in a tiny house
before tiny houses were cool.
No running water, no electricity,
and in front of this garden was where, or this cabin,
was where I created my first garden, with Mark.
There's lots of mistakes in this garden,
a lot of things that I wouldn't do in the present day,
but I think it was a pretty good first start.
You can see the cabin in the back right-hand corner.
So we lived right by our garden.
So lots of gardens and things have happened
between Missouri and now.
I live in Madison, Wisconsin,
I've run a lot of different gardening programs.
I've had lots of different gardens in community gardens
and at various houses where I lived.
And this is me in my current garden, in Madison.
So I have a pretty extensive front yard garden.
I love having a front yard garden.
We have met so many people in our neighborhood.
I don't know that I would ever buy a house again
that doesn't have a front yard garden.
People stop by, they take selfies in front of my garden.
They tell me stories about how they interact with my garden
on their own time.
So it's a really, it's a really special experience.
Few more pictures, a big harvest in the summer.
So we're gonna talk about some of the elements
in this garden; as you can see,
I like to have a very productive garden,
productive garden that's also very beautiful.
So I'm always looking for those two things.
And we're gonna talk a lot about the beauty today.
I like to grow a lot of flowers, which we'll talk about today.
And then here's another shot
with me with one of my trellises,
which we'll talk about, and lots of flowers and veggies
at the height of the season.
And then, between my vegetable garden
and the street is a pretty large perennial garden,
which offers a little bit of buffer
between the vegetable garden and cars in the street,
but also is the great introduction to our property.
We live on a corner
that's pretty highly traveled by walkers and bikers.
And so it's a corner that a lot of people
in our neighborhood know about.
And then my garden actually wraps around
the side of my house; this is the south side of the house.
And so we, this is the second part of the garden.
Again, it's still on the corner,
so lots of people biking and walking.
Here's me harvesting some flowers
and then another shot of a trellis,
which we will talk about later in class.
So I'm The Creative Vegetable Gardener.
And I'm here to inspire you to try some new things
and have more fun in your gardens.
But I think a lot of us get stuck in a rut sometimes.
I know I have, I do the same things over and over.
And one time when I taught the class,
somebody said, "I do the same things over and over
in my garden, even when they're not working."
And I've been there too.
So I'm hoping that you come away
with some creative ideas for the garden.
So one thing that I think that happens
is that people, a lot of people think
that vegetable gardens are ugly, right?
That perennial gardens, flower gardens
are where all the beauty lies
and then the vegetable gardens are just utilitarian.
So I'm on the mission to get people
to really elevate their vegetable gardens
and make it a central part of your landscape.
Something that is really beautiful
and has lots of color and texture
because then your garden
can feed your body and your soul.
And I think for a lot of us gardeners,
our gardens do really touch us on a very deep level.
So today we're gonna talk about four high impact ways
to add beauty to your vegetable garden.
Creating your canvas, adding height,
adding flowers, and growing unique varieties.
So the first thing to do is create your canvas.
So if you think about your garden like a painting,
maybe like a Monet painting, you need the canvas.
So this is a picture of my last house.
My husband and I bought a new townhouse, new construction,
not the greatest for a garden.
You can see it basically looks like a wasteland.
This was the first day that we went out to our garden
to start, to get started really, to start building the garden.
I looked at this the other day and I said to my husband,
"Wow, that looks really sad.
There's nothing growing."
So we got started.
How are we gonna design our garden?
So I think what a lot of people do
is they just go out and start tilling it up.
But instead, we decided we're gonna create our canvas.
And our canvas really is the beds and the paths
that offer some structure to the garden.
And then we can use the plants and the colors
and the flowers and the textures to paint upon that canvas
and to make our artwork, which is our garden.
So you can see that immediately,
we're trying to figure out, okay,
what's the design of the garden, what's the layout?
And we're using some scrounged rocks
that we found on the property since it was a construction site
to create some of those beds.
You can see that one is a little bit curved.
They're are a little bit different shapes.
And then we're adding some soil and compost.
So this is definitely a process.
This has not all happened in one year.
This is the after picture.
So before, after, I like to joke,
this is what it looked like the next weekend,
but that is not true; this is seven years later.
So it took a while,
and you can see that it's a little bit different now.
We ended up taking away some of those rocks
and using logs instead.
But the basic layout was the same.
We built upon it year after year
to extend the garden a little bit.
And you can see, we built a little pergola
and added some more plants and some more elements.
So what happens, I think for a lot of people
is they do the flat style of gardening,
which is kind of mimicking farming,
which is, we live in an agricultural state
with a lot of farms, so that makes sense.
But this is a picture from the community garden
where I used to garden
and a lot of people would garden like this.
They would just run their tiller through
and then just plant in straight rows, like a farm.
And it's not really clear where do you walk?
Where are the beds?
Where are the aisles?
And then, this is gonna be
very, very weed-intensive by June.
This person's gonna be in a world of hurt by the summer.
It's just gonna be explosive weeds.
So in contrast, you can have a garden that's more designed.
That has raised beds and paths, that has some kind of structure.
So this is right after we bought our current house;
you can see there's a little work happening on the roof.
My mom came to help us visit
and once we got everything into the house,
we came outside and said,
"Okay, now we're working on the garden."
And my mom said,
"I never knew how much you loved gardening
"until I saw how you moved,
"where you didn't really care about the inside of the house,
you just wanted to work on the garden."
Now in our defense, it was June, so time was short.
So here we are at the second garden,
we're a little bit more organized this time.
This is probably the third garden
we're laying out at a house.
So we're laying out the beds,
the raised beds to see where we're gonna put them.
And then we're using a measuring tape
to actually start to lay out that perennial garden
that you saw in the earlier picture.
So I love this picture,
'cause I feel like my husband is making a case for something
and I don't remember if I agreed to it or not,
but we work pretty well in the garden together.
So we do a lot of big projects together.
And so we're laying out the garden
and then we put down cardboard, we put down wood chips,
really leveled out the beds, made them look really nice,
and then started to fill with some soil that we ordered.
And then we're making a little bit of a berm in the front
so that we can plant the perennial garden.
This is what it looks like later that season,
actually, this was like the next season.
So still a work in progress.
And then this is later that season.
So you can see the perennial garden starting to grow in,
the vegetable garden's behind it.
And then over the years, we built it and tweaked it.
And this is the picture that you saw before.
So this is the expanded garden, but you can see at this picture,
that things look really neat and organized,
even though there's a wild characteristic to this garden
where I like to have vines and I like to have flowers
and I like to have a lot of things going on,
but underneath it, there's the organizing principles
of the beds and the paths,
and I think it's a lot easier to maintain a garden
over the long term with those beds and paths.
And I think it's more attractive.
So less work.
And I'm all about that for gardening.
Gardening's already a lot of work,
so if we can cut down on some of the labor, that would be,
that's always a win in my book.
And then it's better for soil health.
So running a tiller through your garden every year
multiple times a season really destroys the soil structure.
So one of the things I like about having
established beds and paths is that I never till.
I've never tilled my garden in 20 years.
I just work on working on the soil, adding compost,
growing cover crop, and really focusing on the soil
that's in the beds, and in the soil in the aisles,
I don't need to worry about.
I just cover it with wood chips and walk all over it.
And then like we said, it really makes a tidier garden.
And I think a tidy garden
is a more attractive garden because like me,
then you can build upon it and put different elements
in there that make it a little bit more wild
or a little bit more artistic or more colorful.
But you still have that structure
that makes it easy to maintain, or let's say easier to maintain.
So here's a couple examples of some different gardens
I worked in and some pictures I found.
This is a garden that I designed for somebody,
very simple, raised beds,
don't have to be anything complicated.
This is the more traditional style
where we just used cedar and I made boxes out of it.
This is my old community garden plot.
So you can just use scrounged materials,
which I do a lot in my garden.
We found lots of bigger stones and rocks and some logs.
The benefit of that is really then
you can start making organic shapes,
if you like to have a little bit more free-flowing design.
I found this one online; I thought was really cool.
It would be fun to have a circle garden someday.
And they have, you could have a little fruit tree
in the middle of it, which would be cool.
And again, it looks like they just use some urbanite
or something that they scrounged
so it looks like there's some old bricks.
It's nothing that expensive, nothing that fancy,
but it still looks really great.
And then you saw in an earlier picture
how we were laying out those first raised beds
in the front yard garden.
Well, later that fall, I actually extended the garden.
I had no more raised beds left
and I didn't really feel like buying more lumber,
and so the second style that I have is what I call
mounded raised beds.
So this was all grass,
all I did was lay down cardboard.
And then I used some twine and some stakes to shape my beds.
It's a little hard to see here,
but they're a little bit curved in the picture.
And then I just started dumping soil
that I had from a pile that I ordered into those beds.
And then I used a rake and then just shaped them
into how I wanted them and then dumped wood chips
all over the cardboard in the aisles.
So that was pretty, that was pretty quick.
That was like an instant garden.
And then I started to,
this is going into the fall, so then I mulched all the beds.
You can see the two far beds are mulched.
And then I thought, "I better take a picture
before I mulch them," so the last three are still soil.
There's another shot.
So it's just a rounded raised bed.
But that slight difference between the,
almost like that little topography,
I think makes it a little bit easier to maintain
than having a completely flat garden.
And this, this is the side of my house.
Also that first fall, we worked on the side garden.
You can see this is actually another style.
So I have three different styles of beds in my garden,
so you can certainly mix and match.
Same thing, we had some logs and rocks
and decided what we wanted the beds to look like,
filled them with soil,
and then just put cardboard over all the grass,
dumped in wood chips, mulched all the beds,
and then it was ready to go for the fall,
for the next season, so just sat there over the winter.
We probably, we might've planted garlic in one of the beds.
So I think this picture's a good illustration of these beds.
So when you look at this picture, it looks neat and tidy.
It looks pretty organized, you can see the beds,
gives some structure to the garden,
but there's still that wildness and color and some trellises,
so that's what we're gonna talk about next.
So I thought this was great,
this is someone that took this class
a few years ago and she said,
"I just had to write and thank you
"for your inspiring class this past spring.
"We live in an old house and struggled over the years
"with our garden.
"You encouraged us to add some beds
"to our already established plot.
"Instead of our garden being a chore,
"it has been an awesome year of harvest and delight
"to be out there picking and weeding.
Thank you."
So I'm gonna let this person sell the idea
of established beds and paths in your garden.
Okay, so that was creating our canvas.
And now that we have that foundation laid,
we're going to add some height.
So this is my garden, I think this is the second spring.
And I came out in the spring
and there was actually no landscaping around our house
and I thought, "Ugh, it looks so boring."
The vegetable garden in the spring can be,
everything's little and it can be kind of flat.
And there's not a lot of interest.
So I thought, "I need some quick height."
And this was only a second season.
So we still didn't exactly know,
are we gonna keep the garden like it is?
Are there other things that we wanna build?
Do we wanna change things?
So I thought, "I just want some temporary trellises."
And so I went out and bought some cattle panel
or livestock panel, and you can just get that
at Farm & Fleet or Fleet Farm
or any other kind of store near your house.
And I set about making trellises.
So the first one I made,
I cut in half with some bolt cutters,
then put the feet in either side of an aisle.
So one side's in one bed, one side's in the other bed.
Then it comes together at a point
and then I wired it together.
And then I put, you can see some green T-posts in,
or really U-posts, 'cause they're a lot shorter.
So some short, green U-posts, pounded them into the ground,
and then attached the wire to the U-posts.
Very easy, definitely a two-person job,
but doesn't take very long.
And there it is later in the season.
So on this one, it looks like I have
some winter squash on the left-hand side
and then some cherry tomatoes on the right-hand side.
There's another one, more in the middle of the season.
I have some winter squash and it looks like some cucumbers
'cause I can see the yellow flowers,
and then cherry tomatoes on the other side.
I almost always plant cherry tomatoes
on some of the trellises.
And then there it is in a different season.
You can see the tomatoes all the way, cherry tomatoes,
all the way up above the trellis, it's coming,
reaching for the light, and then eventually,
it'll flop over and start to grow down.
And then one more shot, cherry tomatoes on the right,
looks like some more winter squash,
some black-eyed Susan vine.
You can see the little flower poking through.
So I like to mix and match a lot of things in my trellis,
and we'll talk about that before we end
this part of the topic.
So the second one I did,
I decided to make an arch, same thing though.
I wanted it to go over an aisle in the garden
because it's fun to be able to go under the trellises.
So we didn't cut it in half, we just bent it over,
used the same U-post method,
and then attached the trellis to the U-post.
So originally I used zip ties,
but they don't last very well in the sun,
they tend to photo degrade.
So when we rebuilt them a couple years ago,
we used wire and that lasts a lot longer.
And then this is what it looks like later
in one of the seasons, this is when I grew love vine,
which I wouldn't necessarily recommend
because it doesn't flower till pretty late in our area,
but it was a jungle.
By the time I wanted to go under the trellis,
I'd have to kind of duck and make my way under the trellis,
which was really fun.
This is it, another year.
One of my favorite things to grow
on these cattle panel trellises is winter squash.
I think this looks like delicata squash.
I can see a little delicata squash.
The leaves are big and dramatic,
and it actually gives them a little bit more airflow.
So they tend to have fungal issues less when they're up.
And then sometimes the squash hangs down
through the trellis.
So that is also something that I always plant on my trellises
is just because the impact of the squash leaves is just,
it's really beautiful.
Here's another one, this one's another really jungley year.
I had some fall blooming clematis on there.
That was, it didn't like that spot.
So it didn't end up surviving,
but that was quite an amazing year.
So I had lots of white flowers and the squash,
the squash leaves, there's some tomatoes on the side.
So it was really lots of colors and textures happening.
And then one more year, it looks like
I have some cherry tomatoes, I have a hyacinth bean,
which is those big purple flowers sticking up.
That was a fun year.
So I definitely recommend trying to mix some flowers in.
So now we're back at this photo,
and I like this photo because I think
if I took away those cattle panel trellises,
the garden wouldn't be as nearly as interesting.
So just by a couple hours of work, not that expensive,
the cattle panel trellises are usually $30 or less.
So for less than a hundred bucks,
I made two trellises that have a lot of visual impact
in my garden and are a lot of fun to grow things on.
So if we photoshopped those two trellises out of the picture,
I don't think it would look as interesting.
So then our COVID project,
at the beginning of COVID this spring.
I had never really had an entrance to my garden.
So we come out the front door
and you come towards this part of the garden,
and I have a two-foot rabbit fence
and I would just climb over the fence,
sometimes trip over the fence or rip my pants on the fence.
So I said to my husband, "I think it's time to build.
I want a nice entrance to the garden."
So, and I thought, well, I really love those cattle panels.
So why don't we just make another cattle panel?
So we went to the store, got another cattle panel.
I cut the fence and we positioned it,
and then I filled in the beds around it.
And then there's an old screen door.
That's the entrance door right now,
until we build something nicer.
But here it is later that season, again,
a lot of impact just for a little bit of a trellis.
And now I have to say, it's much more enjoyable
to go into my garden, it feels like a real entrance,
a welcoming into the garden.
And then we ended up building a mixed media path
that goes from the garden entrance to our front steps.
So it used to just be grass.
So we had scrounged a lot of different materials,
bought some materials, and then made a really nice path.
So now it really feels like an entrance to a garden,
the grand entrance that my garden deserves.
And then I actually decided to make another one
in the, this is what I call the back door of the garden
because you can see my back door,
which is my kitchen door.
Sometimes I run out to get something for dinner
and then I would just hop over the fence.
So I thought, "Let's make a back door as well."
And so we just did same thing,
another cattle panel trellis with some soil.
I just added some soil so that I could plant
at the base of the trellis.
And here's me later that season.
Actually, I had climbing nasturtium on the left,
which is really fun to grow.
I didn't even know there was climbing nasturtium
until a few years ago.
And then on the right are those cherry tomatoes.
Most of the time, I grow Sungold.
And a few other ideas for trellises.
If you don't have room for any cattle panel trellis,
although I highly recommend them because you can add a bunch more
growing space to your garden, as well as beauty and impact.
This is another little teepee trellis
I had in my garden.
My husband is an arborist and he cut down some birch,
and I said, "Ooh, bring it home
so I can make a little teepee trellis,"
just tied them together at the top.
And then I grew sweet peas.
There it is again.
You can see that when you're looking at the whole garden,
your eye is really drawn to that trellis.
And even if there's nothing on it, there's still,
it still offers some impact.
And so if you photoshopped that out,
it wouldn't be quite as interesting.
There's not an element that's really drawing your eye in.
After I got rid of the birch one, I built this tuteur
and painted it my favorite color, which is turquoise.
I'm not a carpenter, so if you look close,
it doesn't look that great.
But from far away, it's really fun.
And I have a clematis that I grow up it,
and also later in the season, climbing nasturtium.
There's a climbing nasturtium almost to the top.
And then there it is from a distance.
Again, it's something that draws your eye in.
My eye goes to that trellis first
and then starts to bounce around the picture,
and look at the other elements.
So one other way to use a cattle panel trellis,
I often, I also use them as flat trellises.
So I grow peas, I grow cucumbers.
You can grow pole beans.
Anything that climbs up
is also a fun way to use the cattle panel.
I found this one online.
This person really went all out with their cattle panel trellis.
So you could, that's pretty beefy,
and you could grow a lot of things on there.
So I like how they made almost a tunnel in their garden.
I found this online as well.
I thought this would be really fun if you have kids
or grandkids that are younger because they like tight spaces.
This is easy to find at a big box store or a nursery.
These kind of trellises aren't very expensive.
And then you could grow some things
and make a little bit of a jungle for the kids.
And then this one,
a lot of people use these bamboo trellises
and I have a few, or teepees.
I have a few and I never really, I don't know,
I never really liked them that much
until I saw this picture and I thought,
"What I've been doing wrong
is I don't use a whole bunch of them."
So the repetition in this picture,
I think really provides a lot of impact.
And so that's what I've done now.
In the past, I'll try to make two or three or four or five
bamboo trellises all together.
And then you can also scrounge a lot of materials.
If you have a lot of woods on your property,
you can just grab branches and limbs
and make your own trellis.
All right, so the best veggies for trellises,
beans, cucumbers, and peas, you know,
they naturally climb, so they have little tendrils.
You can see the little cucumber tendril in the picture.
And so they're very easy to grow on trellises.
I also like to grow cherry tomatoes or regular tomatoes,
particularly cherry tomatoes
because they're so vigorous and they get so tall,
they can just kind of go up and over the trellis.
And it's easy to pick the cherry tomatoes.
I also sometimes grow tomatillos on those trellises.
They don't get quite as tall, but I like to be able to,
tomatillos get big and floppy, and so it's easy
to kind of tie the tomatillos to that trellis.
And then I've said a couple times,
I love growing winter squash on those trellises
because the leaves are just so dramatic.
And it's so cool when the squash hangs down
through the trellis.
And then there's lots of flowering vines
that you can experiment with.
I particularly like flowering nasturtium.
Okay, and so I have lots of favorite varieties.
We're gonna talk a little bit about varieties
before we finish the class,
but this is my book, Smart Start Garden Planner
and I have a whole section in the back
where I talk about my favorite varieties
for all the different vegetables
and herbs and some flowers as well.
So you can find that on my website,
CreativeVegetableGardener.com,
which we'll also talk about before the class is over,
and I have print and digital copies.
Okay, and then lastly,
you can search for trellis ideas on Pinterest.
If you like to use Pinterest, gardeners are very visual;
we like to look at lots of pictures of gardens,
and so you could just go into Pinterest
and say "vegetable garden trellis"
or "vegetable garden cattle panel trellis."
I also have an article on my website
that is "Cattle Panel Trellis,"
and I show more pictures and talk about how I built mine.
Okay, so we've created our canvas,
we added some height, and now we're gonna add flowers,
which you could kind of think of as our paints, right?
Because flowers come in lots of different colors.
So now we're gonna get out our paint palette
and start painting our canvas.
So I also send out an email every Sunday morning
with articles and videos and upcoming classes
and lots of resources for vegetable gardeners.
So you can sign up on my website,
there's a little pop-up that comes up
at CreativeVegetableGardener.com.
All right, adding flowers,
here's me harvesting some flowers in my garden.
I love growing lots of flowers.
And I think in the past, people think,
"Okay, flowers and vegetables, they're separate.
They don't go together."
And I say, "No, no, no, bring them together."
Because then it adds really to both of them.
So one way you can do it is a perennial border.
You saw in the earlier pictures,
the pictures of us building this garden at our house.
We decided right away, we wanted some kind of border
between the street and the vegetable garden.
Eventually we got rid of all the grass and it's all flowers,
but this was the first crack at it.
And so if you grow perennials,
is there a way that you can bring the perennials
closer to your vegetable garden?
One of the benefits really is my perennial garden
is just teeming with insects
throughout the spring, summer, and fall.
And those insects make their way into the vegetable garden
to help pollinate things.
And so it's just so rich with life.
And it's a great way to bring some more activity
into your garden ecosystem.
So can you bring the annuals
and the perennials closer together?
Here's a shot of the perennial garden with the...
And this is in spring too,
where sometimes the vegetable garden's
not super interesting so if I have,
when I have this perennial garden
around my vegetable garden, it offers a little extra color
and texture and interest in the spring
when the vegetable garden's kind of boring.
There's another shot, getting closer to summer.
There's me, harvesting.
So this is getting closer to fall,
so things are really big and really dramatic.
One more shot.
So by, at this point,
you can barely see the vegetable garden
'cause the perennial garden's just bursting.
And then I like this shot
because it's going down the side,
where on the right hand is the perennial garden
with some asters and some goldenrod,
and on the left side is the vegetable garden,
which has some annuals planted in it,
and they're really interacting and working together
and the colors are kind of just
relating to each other and the textures,
so it's really bringing that part of my property together.
And a couple pictures I found online.
I thought this was an interesting one
where sometimes if you have some kind of fence,
you could do the perennials outside the whole fence
or maybe just on the corners or in front of,
at the front of the garden on either side of the gate.
So lots of different options for bringing
some perennials and flowers closer to your vegetable garden.
Ooh, and I like this one too.
That'd be fun to have, basically a raised bed
along the whole outside of her garden.
So the other way you can incorporate
some more flowers are spring bulbs.
So I like to use bulbs,
really for a little bit of added color
and interest in the spring.
Again, when the vegetable garden is really boring,
I had lots of different bulbs around my garden,
around my property, and then one year,
I went out to my vegetable garden and I thought,
"Why don't I plant bulbs in the vegetable garden?"
And I thought, "That's a great idea."
So I just took some of the corners of the beds,
dug some holes, put some bulbs in there,
and now I have a little bit of color.
You can see there's not much going on
in the vegetable garden, this is pretty early,
but I have some bulbs
that are really offering some color, which is fun.
So a few more pictures of bulbs in the garden.
I love to hunt down really unique varieties.
And then finally, you can use annuals in the bed end.
So when I'm planting my garden,
I always reserve a little bit of space
at the end of the bed, not necessarily every bed.
Sometimes it's both ends of the bed.
Sometimes it's just one end; once in a while I don't have,
I just plant all vegetables.
But you can see in this bed, I have four rows of beans
and then in front of that,
I have dill, and then I reserved a little space,
I have a rudbeckia, I have a sage, tricolor sage,
and then I have a verbena.
And those are just to offer
a little bit of color and texture
to mix with the vegetables.
So here that bed is later in the year.
It was actually a happy accident that the purple of the verbena
and the yellow of the dill really worked well together.
And then you can see the rudbeckias
a little shorter down at the bottom.
Yep, there they are, two together.
So lots of, it is really fun to mix and match
a lot of different flowers.
Here's another bed end.
I have carrots growing in most of the bed
and then I have some rudbeckia and globe amaranth
and then some purple verbena on the other side.
And then one more, this is a corner, pretty,
this is by one of those trellises
on the side of the house.
So it's the corner of the property,
a lot of people see it,
and so I always plant a lot of flowers there.
And here's me harvesting another bed end.
Sometimes I just put flowers in every bed end.
And then again, if we go back to this picture,
if we took out the trellises, then there's less interest.
And then if we took out all the flowers,
then it really becomes more boring.
So it's the trellises, my eye goes to the trellises,
and then starts to bounce around, oh, yellow, red, purple.
And then I start to look at some of the green.
So it's really a way to draw your eye into the garden.
And then like we talked about, flowers really attract
a lot of visitors, mostly good visitors.
And then it's really fun to go out
and see what insects are in your garden.
I love to go outside with my camera
and then I try to look for insects
and see if I can take pictures of some of them.
And sometimes, the insects match themselves
perfectly to the flowers
and then you can take a really cool picture like this one.
So I've seen lots and lots of monarchs.
This is a little sweat bee, this little green torso.
I don't even know what kind of bee that is.
Sometimes I don't figure out what the different...
That could be a fly or a bee.
There's a honey bee, they really like the alliums.
And then there's cool webs that form in the flowers.
This is on a dewy morning where I took some pictures.
I found this little frog, this toad,
in my spiderwort, in the perennial garden.
One time I was just taking pictures
and all of a sudden I looked in and I thought,
"Oh, my gosh, a frog or a toad."
And then the trellises actually bring in birds.
A lot of birds like to perch.
This is a hummingbird on the trellis.
So one thing you wanna think about
is growing flowers from every season.
When you start in the spring,
there's lots of early, mid, and late season bulbs,
and then you can plant all the way through the summer,
and then you can plant some frost-hardy flowers.
Sometimes I have flowers all the way up through,
into November, depending on what flowers I have.
So some of my favorites are Lady in Red Salvia.
This is what the hummingbirds really like
or any kind of Red Salvia,
but I particularly like Lady in Red.
Strawberry Fields Gomphrena,
there's a lot of really pretty Gomphrenas.
This is my favorite and because, and I like the taller ones.
There's a lot of shorter Gomphrenas,
but the red, tall one, it's very frost-hardy.
So it lasts for a bit in the fall.
And then I love to mix the Gomphrena
with Prairie Sun Rudbeckia.
And I love this Rudbeckia
because you can see the middle of the flower,
there's no black; it's a greenish,
and then it's a dark yellow and a light yellow.
So I really love that combination.
So those two are a classic combination
in my garden for many, many years.
And then verbena is very tall and airy.
And that's a really good accent plant as well
because it doesn't block other things.
So you can plant it in the bed end
and you can still see the vegetable plants.
And then lots of beautiful zinnias out there.
The Queen Red Lime or the Queen series
is really interesting,
there's Queen Red Lime, Queen Red Orange,
all these different combinations.
And I love the subtlety of the colors on the petals.
Okay, so then this picture is,
well, if we took out the trellises,
if we took out the beds, if we took out the flowers,
it's a much less interesting garden.
So a lot of times people ask me where to find varieties.
I buy most of my seeds
from Johnny's Selected Seeds and High Mowing.
And then you can also go to nurseries
and your local farmers market to try to find unique varieties.
All right, so we created our canvas,
we added height, we added flowers,
and now we're gonna end on growing unique varieties.
So I say, you can buy a red tomato, an orange carrot,
and a green bean from the grocery store
any time of the year.
That's why I always hunt for the most unique and colorful
and interesting varieties to grow in my garden
because I don't wanna grow things
I can get in the grocery store.
So I'm gonna share a few of my favorites.
I'm always trialing new varieties
and I only like to grow things that perform really well,
that taste great, and are also really beautiful.
So I don't grow things just for the looks, because again,
I want a lot of food outta my garden, as well as beauty.
So Lively Yellow pepper.
A lot of people struggle with growing colored peppers.
My suggestion is to grow the long, Italian-style peppers.
Those are a lot more successful, at least in my Wisconsin garden.
These yellow ones are a nice pop of color in the spring
or in the summer, and they do pretty well in Wisconsin.
Purple Ruffles basil is just a gorgeous basil,
it, purple basil is gorgeous on its own.
But this one, if you look at the edges of the leaves,
it does have a little ruffle to it
that makes it very attractive,
especially if you mix it with green basil
in one of your garden beds,
or you could put it on a bed end with some flowers.
Trilogy beans, I don't like to grow just green beans.
So there's some mixes that have purple, yellow, and green.
It kind of reminds me of a little Mardi Gras color scheme.
And so it's really fun to go out and harvest a whole bunch
of different colored beans from the same row.
Golden Sweet peas, I don't know about you,
but a lot of times when I harvest peas,
I come out the next day
and there's still a whole bunch on the vine,
and I think, "How did I miss all of these yesterday?"
It's because the peas are the same color as the plant,
so it's hard to see them.
Yellow Golden Sweet peas are so beautiful,
they're really easy to spot.
And I had these where I could come out my front door
and I would, this trellis would always catch my eye,
and the yellow peas were like these little jewels
that were just twinkling in the sunlight
and just hanging out there in the garden,
just brought me a lot of joy.
And then Deep Purple carrot.
You should definitely be growing
lots of different variety of carrots,
there's so many beautiful colors.
This one in particular is a very deep purple.
This one was cool, 'cause it had some white stripes
and those three little white lines.
When I cut into it, I thought,
"Oh, my gosh, I have to take a picture,
it's so beautiful, almost too beautiful to eat."
And then Green Zebra and Moonglow tomato.
If you've never grown Green Zebra, it's a fun tomato.
That's what it looks like when it's ripe
and yellowish green.
And then Moonglow is an orange tomato.
Both, I always grow every year in my garden.
And then finally, Dancer eggplant,
there is no other purple like this in the garden.
I call it electric purple.
It's a very prolific eggplant, pretty easy to grow,
and it's somewhere between the fat Italian-style eggplant
and the skinny Japanese eggplant.
So it's an nice shape and a nice size
for cooking and chopping.
All right, so there is an example
of a colorful harvest from my garden.
And for me, it brings me even more joy
to harvest this amazingly beautiful food
that I want to take a picture of.
So again, Johnny's and then Seed Savers and High Mowing
is where I get a lot of those varieties.
And then you can find lots more varieties in my book,
CreativeVegetableGardener.com is where you can find that
and some of the other books I've written.
Okay, so, we learned four different ways
to add impact to your garden.
And I wanna end on reminding you
to make sure you create a seating area
so you can sit and enjoy all your hard work
and all the beauty that you've created.
So here's me and my husband in that first townhouse
that you saw us building the garden,
and a few other seating areas of people I know
or things I've seen online.
This is somebody that I know, very simple, really cute.
Maybe it's even just a bench in your favorite color
that's in the corner of your garden,
where you have coffee or tea.
Mosaic bench.
That would be pretty cool.
I love this one, this is obviously an artist's house.
So you could commission somebody to make you a really cool bench.
And then this is somebody that's from,
in my gardening community and she said,
"Thanks for making gardening fun.
"I now have an eye-pleasing garden
"that yields an abundance of produce.
"This year, I planted a bench in the middle of it all
just so I can sit and enjoy the view."
Thanks, Abby.
So I encourage you this season
to really think about how can you add color and uniqueness
and your own personal touch,
your own artistic impression, expression on your garden
to bring more joy to the gardening experience this year.
So thanks for coming, I'm Megan,
and you can find me at CreativeVegetableGardener.com.
I wish you an abundant
and beautiful gardening season this year.