A Slow Tour of my Cottage Gardens | Potager Garden | Spring Garden Tour

Welcome to my garden. It's a bit messy. We've had company for a few weeks and I haven't been down here in too many days. And usually what that means is that you'll find tennis shoes or socks or piles of weeds laying around. I wanted to take you on a tour of our potager garden. This is the garden that surrounds our house directly. Show you all the beautiful flowers that are in bloom right now. We'll clean up a little bit along the way and hopefully I'll answer a lot of the questions that you might have about our garden spaces. Where should we start? Here? Start on the edge? The type of garden that we have surrounding ourself, I would consider a cottage garden. Things are homemade looking, if you will. And part of that look and that aesthetic that I love comes from letting things grow in and self-seed. A lot of times cottage gardens are really packed full of all of the gardener's favorite flowers. This garden is no exception. Even though this garden is only two years old, it's already full of all kinds of stuff I love. A lot of which has self-seeded from the years previous and that is intentional. Take these Johnny jump ups for example. Now these started as just a few seeds a couple of years ago. But if you let them go and let them go to seed, this is what they'll do. They'll just spread all over. Now some people don't like this about cottage gardening because it means your lines are a little bit messier than they might be in a traditional garden. But this is one of the things I love about it and this is what makes it possible for me to be able to even have this many gardens. I certainly couldn't keep up on keeping clean lines on this many beds. Another perfect example of this would be something like this Cosmo here, which is another one that loves to go to seed. Around the gardens you'll see things like forget-me-nots. There's strawberry ground cover that creeps all over. Creeping Jenny around the ponds which spreads everywhere. Succulents like to spread everywhere. Lady's mantle behind me is another perfect example. So when I come down to clean through my garden beds or what I call fluff my garden beds, what that means is I'm going to pull out any major weeds that I have. I'm going to pull out anything that's self-seeded where I don't want it to self-seed. An example of that would be these hollyhocks. Hollyhocks, I know some people have a hard time growing them, but for us they're one of our biggest weeds and it likes to self-seed everywhere. So I've got some of those along the pathway that I need to pull out. Other than that I've got roses to deadhead, a few things to prune back, and we just sort of work our way through, clean through the space as we go. Doesn't take too long but it's amazing what that will sort of do to a space like this. That kind of helps to keep things in check. Up until this last year this is where the garden stopped. Now behind me is where we put in our pond and we'll talk a little bit more about that in another video. But there's so many native grasses here that I couldn't fight them anymore. And one of the things I love about cottage gardening is that it gives you the freedom to play with the landscape and play with what's there already to get something that really is beautiful that goes well with the landscape. So instead of fighting all that grass behind me I decided to play well with it and to create these little wildflower meadows. Now they're still at their very beginning stages. It's going to take them years to develop fully but it allows the grasses that are already here to have a home, to have a space, and then as we creep into the garden we sort of start taming the wild a little bit more. One of the tasks that's on my list this time of year is to prune back and deadhead my roses. Now I've spoken about this before. I love old English roses. These are David Austen's and this plant is about four years old so it's done a lot of growing in that time. But to deadhead, you know, roses can be scary for the amateur gardener. I know they were scary for me for a long time but other than just planting them according to the instructions and making sure to deadhead them and prune them back once a year, they've been really easy keepers. You did? If you're wanting to create a cottage garden space where you are, roses are one of the very easiest way to do that. Other examples of cottage garden flowers would be things like coral bells, hollyhocks, ladies' mantles, snapdragons, lavender, campanula, hydrangeas. These are all really typical plants that you see in a cottage garden. You know, part of one of the joys of gardening is getting to find your style, finding what plants you love. You might not like the same color of roses or like roses at all but it's your garden so you get to create it in the space that you want. I love roses so I welcomed a lot of them into the garden over the years. Behind me is my greenhouse. This greenhouse served me really well this winter and early this spring when I was needing to grow a lot of vegetables and flowers. I have to say it's pretty horrific right now. It's full of garbage and empty soil bags and weeds and I really need to get in there to tend to it but it's so hot in there during the day that it's a project best left for night. I just need to prioritize it but it's a beautiful space. Stu just built this greenhouse sort of out of his brain. I've had a lot of people ask me about plans or guides or something that they could follow. We don't have any. We just sort of dreamed it up and out it came. There's still some stuff I'd like to do to it like put down a brick floor in it but that will come with time. A big part about gardening and one that I'm not so great at but I'm trying to get better at is just patience. Being patient with yourself as things grow and develop and change over time. Your style's going to change. Plants will die. It's just the cycle of gardening. This magnolia is a perfect example. Before this little tree lived here we had a beautiful almond tree that we had loved on for three years before we lost it in a windstorm. So this now has been here for about a year. I don't feel like it's grown much even though it's healthy and alive and growing albeit so slowly. In about 20 years this is going to be a magnificent tree that's going to create a whole little subclimate right here in the greenhouse gardens but for now we just have to. Let's go walk through the shade garden. You'll notice that parts of our garden are still pretty wild. Pretty I don't like the word messy but uh loose let's say. And because that's my style and because that's a great attribute of a cottage garden some of these spaces work really well especially along the edges of the property. So this garden right here was just put in this year except for the dogwood. Those have been here for two years but other than that everything's just been planted this year and it sort of fades off into the orchard. So it's another place where we've let grasses grow. We've let hollyhocks self-seed. We've scattered just chamomile and cornflower and all kinds of things that will self-seed and soften the edges a little bit. I'm really happy actually. It's wild but it's beautiful. This right now as of now is the only shaded spot on our entire property because our trees are still so young except for this oak tree. This was here when we moved in. Obviously it's been here for many years and what I love about it is it's allowed me to create this shade garden totally different than any other garden we have on the property. Some of the plants are the same like the lady's mantle or the roses or the lamb's ear but some of them are things that you can't grow anywhere else on the property like my hostas back behind me. Those are shade loving plants. They need to be protected from our really really hot summer so they're quite happy in here. This garden probably more than any other garden is one that I've really let come to life on its own. I've let forget me not spread everywhere, johnny jump ups, the strawberry, the lamb's ear, there's foxglove, poppies, beautiful hardy geranium. I mean this is just a little sliver of wild and even though it's just five feet off the gravel path when you're in here you feel like you're in a different space. This space is also home to our apple tree that is bearing fruit for the very first time this year. This is a russet apple. It's an old heirloom variety of apple that was used for cider and my hope is that I can get a nice hard cider stored up in the cellar for winter. It's a special space. So when we moved into this property four years ago all of what you see behind me was just grass. So much grass. We countered that by a lot of weeding, a lot of weed tarp, and a lot of gravel. I'm a big fan of gravel pathways. I love the way they look and the way that they sound. So that's what we sort of designed to carry you through down to the greenhouse and ultimately down to the pond area. But this area to the right of me was one of the areas I'm most creatively proud of how it turned out because it was this really really weird hill but just had a horrible soil. Nothing would grow on it. We planted it a couple times and finally we just had to take a step back and say okay what else can we do here? And what we decided to do was put in a little stream. There's a few things that are really nice about this. For one it gives our bees a place to drink and our cats and our chickens too. For two it's right next to the outdoor seating area and so we get to hear the water rushing as we're sitting outside. It's a really soothing effect. And for three it gave me a place to plant things around. Things like succulents and creeping genny. Of course more strawberries. I've got a lot of strawberries. Snow in summer. There's some hardy rosemary here that's actually hardy to our zone which is fantastic. And a lot that is just sort of self-seeded or that birds have dropped. So it's this really natural area of the garden and it starts at the top. It goes about 20 feet down to the pool and the pond down at the bottom. It's really beautiful. It's a really big attraction for the kids. They're always on the hunt for tadpoles or bugs or some sort of larva or just putting something in the top and watching it float to the bottom. It's just a really beautiful space and to me it reminds me of how sometimes you have to push yourself in the garden to creatively think beyond what's easiest, beyond what you would instantly do to get to that next level of design and that next level of creativity. I love it. This area behind me is the courtyard. Welcome. This is where people are supposed to come into our house although 90% of people end up at the kitchen door. I love the design of this house because it created this little pocket. Now when we moved in this was a trek decking with an old broken hot tub on it and now it's just this small little courtyard that's filled with all of the flowers and things that we love. Again we relied on a lot of gravel. We have some flagstone that we brought in from Montana. That sounds really fancy. We didn't actually bring it in. We got it from a guy who gets it in Montana and then we just created structures. Now we created these beds like I've talked about before. We put down logs and twigs and branches. We lined things in rock and then we put a bunch of soil and compost on top so it sort of created these little raised beds. You'll notice everything that we have here is lined with rock. This is a malaga basalt that we get from a neighbor of ours so it's a really local rock to us and I love it because it gives things a little place to self-seed. It gives a spot for critters to hide and it just looks nice. It adds a different structure to the garden. So welcome. One of the questions we get asked a lot about our gardens is how we water them or if we have to water them. Yes we have to water. We have to water a lot. Unfortunately I learned to garden a lot from Monty Dawn's books and he does not have to water because he lives in a very rainy spot of a very rainy country. That is not us. We are a high desert climate here where we live. What that means is really cold winters, really hot summers, and a very dry climate. So we'll get a sprinkling but very rarely do we get a solid downpour. Luckily here on our farm we have a well that we can draw from and so we use well water to irrigate all of our beds. Everything has been, what do you call it, tube polytubed in. So there's tubes that run underneath the ground up into the beds and then we have a lot of these little micro sprinklers placed throughout. If we don't water here most everything dies other than some of our evergreen stuff. You know some of the stuff that's just a little bit more drought tolerant like the succulents but in order to keep things like snapdragons or foxglove or anything like that alive we have to irrigate. Not very much. Just about 10 minutes a day is enough to keep things going but we do rely heavily on our well water in order to do that. Another thing that we're commonly asked is how we keep everything weeded. So I've shared a couple of my secrets which is over plant, pack all those plants in and there's less room for weeds to grow, let things self-seed so that you have a little bit softer edges as it were to keep things weeded. Weeds aren't as noticeable that way. And the third way is just to get on your hands and knees and weed. So we don't use roundup on our gravel pathways. We don't use any kind of weed killer at all. The only thing that we use is vinegar sometimes we'll use on weeds and pathways and just a lot of hand weeding. While the work of weeding is never really done the good thing is that the more that you do it and the more you let weeds not go to seed if you catch them before if you're on top of it every year the weeds do get a little bit better. So take part. This is a marathon not a sprint. Should we go to the potager? All right. This is where almost all the visitors enter our house. So to the right of me is where we park our cars. Directly to the left is our kitchen door. And this is a little area that we created a couple of years ago to make that feel as good as possible as welcoming as possible. So Stuart built me this actually while I was out of town on a business trip and I came back to find this beautiful pergola made out of these rough uh what do you call these split rail cedar woody things. And then above that we just did some bamboo netting from Lowe's and planted a wisteria that was very eager to please and has since completely covered this pergola. Now I know what you're thinking eventually the wisteria is going to get so strong that it's going to tear it down. And you're right it will. Wisteria is really aggressive but it's also really beautiful. So sometimes you just have to take the risk. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. Couple that with my favorite vine to plant along the house. Now we have a stucco house which means there's no shingles to pop off. There's no siding to disrupt. And what that means for me as a gardener is that I can plant vines on my house. And I have planted Creeping Virginia in the courtyard and in this entryway as well because of the way that it creeps and crawls up. I love it. It creates a complete magical feeling, a completely different atmosphere. It's a bit of a jungle right now though isn't it? So this is my potager garden. I give all the gardens names because that way I can yell at people where a tool is or where I'm gonna be working. This is the potager. Now a potager typically means flowers and vegetables mixed together. We'll talk about vegetables in a different video because there's a lot to be said around that. But surrounding the vegetable garden or the kitchen garden right here are flowers and herbs. These are the first gardens that I put in when we moved to this house. I've had to redo them two or three times to get them the way that I like them simply because I've learned so much in the process of gardening. I've learned what colors I like and which I don't like. So you'll see the general shades of the potager garden are softer pastels. It all kind of sticks within this purple, pink, blue, apricot sort of a color spectrum. There's not bright oranges or bright reds or bright yellows. Everything's just a little bit dialed back. This year I introduced a bunch of burgundy roses which next year will be really beautiful with all the spring purple that we get. But I mean on the whole it's just a gorgeous space. All the sunflowers that you see were planted by birds from a few sunflowers I had last year. Hollyhocks have spread all over the place. I've tried to remember where to plant annuals so that they wouldn't completely get snuffed out by all the perennials. And you know sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not. But just working through the gardens and dividing plants and pruning plants and spreading them out it's just I mean this is the best place in the world to be. You know gardening isn't something that you're ever done with. There's no finish line. It's a process. It's a journey. It's a way of life in a way where when you have free time you come out and explore. When you need a boost of creativity or beauty or peace you just come out and enjoy the spaces that you've created. And whether that's pots on your front doorstep that's a great first step to take. Whether it's a five acre farm filled with flowers there's no right or wrong way to garden. This is the way that I garden. This is a style that I love and I hope you've enjoyed the tour of my cottage gardens.