This banana tree is enjoying its third summer in my friends’ garden. It spends the winter wrapped up and stored in the garage, but goes right back to making gorgeous leaves once it is repotted in spring when danger of frost has passed.
My closest friends are also gardeners.
This tomato, planted in a new raised bed, is well over ten feet tall. The netting is there to keep the squirrels out, but being squirrels, they keep finding their way inside to steal the juicy not-quite-ripe tomatoes.
Although we have many shared interests, the conversation usually gets back around to how our gardens are doing.
This raised bed garden, in its second season, got new and improved fencing this year. It has produced a steady supply of flowers and vegetables since spring.
We share plants,
My friend’s begonias, which she has grown so beautifully from little cuttings I’ve given her over the years.
we share ideas for how to grow things better,
A new experiment in container gardening, learned in a seminar this spring. The bamboo carries water to a reservoir in the bottom of the container. The vegetables are relatively safe here on the deck.
we share ideas for how to foil the neighborhood deer and squirrels,
and we often share our harvests with one another.
Zucchini
Some of my friends have been kind enough to allow me to take photos in their gardens this month.
As you’ll notice, we each have our own peculiar ways growing things;
and we all take great joy in watching our gardens progress from seed, bulb, and cutting to mature and beautiful plants.
Okra, Cleome, herbs, squash, and ginger lilies share this raised bed.
We mix our summer vegetables with flowers.
Beautiful peppers surrounded by Italian flat leaf parsley, Basil, cucumbers, tomatoes, and various flowering perennials.
We’ve learned plants planted in raised beds grow infinitely better than what we plant directly in the ground.
My friend has been experimenting with Hugelkulture, building raised beds on a foundation of branches found in her ravine. This gives more growing space in her steeply banked yard.
We grow as much as we can in pots.
We love our fig trees.
And we make sure to plant flowers full of nectar for the butterflies.
Most of all, we love sharing our gardens with each other.
All photos by Woodland Gnome
“Maxmillian” prairie sunflowers, a great favorite flower of my friends, twice as large here as in the more shaded beds in back yard.
A Ginko tree, carefully dug from another property, and transplanted into this garden, is thriving in its new home.
Related articles
- What Plants Talk About (nextworldtv.com)
- Learning to Garden in a Forest
- Bringing Birds To the Garden (forestgardenblog.wordpress.com)
- DIY Hugelkultur: How Build Raised Permaculture Garden Beds (inhabitat.com)
- Beginning, Again: Step By Step for Building and Planting a Raised Bed (forestgardenblog.wordpress.com)
- Pruning (forestgardenblog.wordpress.com)
Forest Garden 
Pingback: Learning to Garden in a Forest | Forest Garden
how beautifully you put all that together dear friend. thanks
Thank YOU for sharing your garden so generously. We must do it all again 😉