Our Complete Mid-Summer Garden Tour 2026

It's July 13th here in our garden, and we're going to go on a full tour today. Along the way, you'll see the flowers and the vegetables that we're growing. I'll try to give you tips and tricks that we've learned throughout the season since we started this garden, as we move through the tour. I'm excited to show you. Let's go ahead and get started. For those of you that are new to the channel, I'm Peter with The Garden Family, and we garden in Southwest Ohio, planting zone 6B. Our last frost this year was, I think, May 7th, but it's usually end of April, early May, and then our first frost is usually towards the end of October. As far as the layout of the garden, it's approximately 70 by 100 feet, so it's about a 7,000 square foot garden. We have a combination of raised beds, as well as some in-ground plantings, and then you'll see later on kind of a hugelkultur area, where we let some of our pumpkin sprawl down below. We broke ground on the garden in the fall of 2022, with the 2023 season being the first season that we had sort of a full season of growing things in the garden. At that point, we mostly just had the raised beds with a small area additionally, and then subsequently, over the years, we've added the fencing, kind of additional planting areas, until we have the garden we see today. The raised beds are made of pressure-treated 4x4 lumber, and each bed is four 4x4s high, so that makes them about 14 inches high. We do have drip irrigation in the raised beds, but we don't have any other irrigation for the rest of the garden. It's probably an improvement we'll make in the future. The pathways are just arborist wood chips in a relatively deep layer. We felt like that was the best option. We didn't want to have to mow grass for living pathways, and we definitely didn't want rocks or landscape fabric getting in our garden. But let's go ahead and start the tour by looking at the tomatoes and this kind of big contraption that we have here for our tomatoes first. We have six different tomato plants growing in this 4x12 foot bed, and each of them are being trained to a few liters up this tower. I will say this season, I've been a little bit lazier about keeping them to the three liters I initially intended, but that's okay. As far as varieties of the six plants that are in here, we have Pink Berkeley tie-dye, Brandy Boy, Mortgage Lifter, that's what you can see right here, and then we have Black Crim and Cherokee Purple, as well as Mr. Stripy. This one here is a Pink Berkeley tie-dye, and it is a really, really tasty tomato. The Pink Berkeley tie-dyes have sort of a darker tomato taste, so similar to sort of a Black Crim, and they're more of a slicing tomato inside, less of a beefsteak structure, and then they're sort of a deep red or purple type color in the reddish parts, but then it keeps these green flecks, so it's really interesting. It's a combination of a really pretty tomato, but it also tastes really good. Only downside, I'd say, is that the flesh tends to be, or the skin is really, really thin, and so I've found them more prone to cracking and damage. The Brandy Boy tomato, as you can probably imply from the name, is a hybrid Brandywine type tomato. Still has the potato leaves, still has kind of the pink tomato flesh, but a little bit better disease resistance than the standard Brandywine, and then super prolific, you can see these pretty big clusters. Let me grab one so you can kind of see what they look like. So this one's not quite ripe, but they end up with sort of a pink rather than a red coloration. Beefsteak style tomato, super, super tasty. This one, even though it's a hybrid, it is probably as close as I've found to being similar to Brandywine in taste. The last couple of years we've had too many of these just really large beefsteak style tomatoes, so we kind of honed it into our favorite, and last year our favorite was Mortgage Lifter, so that's what we grew today. These get quite big. I will grab this one here for you, and they are a beefsteak style tomato, also somewhat pink in coloration, get bigger than the Brandywine, and these are super good. These ones that have a little blush of color, I'm going to pick these. Any tomato this big will also be susceptible to splitting if we end up getting a decent amount of rain, so you do want to pick them kind of early and just let them ripen on the counter. So the last one here is Mr. Stripey. This one is a yellow tomato with kind of a red or orange striations that come out, kind of the blossom end of the tomato. It's a really sweet, mild tomato. This one's Hillary's favorite, as opposed to the darker tomatoes which kind of have a more acidic, you know, deeper tomato taste. This one's really good if someone doesn't think they really like the taste of fresh tomatoes. This one's not too overpowering. It's a great tomato, super sweet, super good. Almost got hit by those robins. Just up this way we have more tomatoes. We're just a little bit up from the tomato tower here, and here we're growing the tomatoes in cages. Now what I will say as far as the comparison between growing them in a more pruned style versus just in cages, it's kind of pluses and minuses. The nice thing about the cages, it's less maintenance. You're not having to go prune and remove suckers and, you know, stake everything up. You just kind of put a big cage around them, kind of let them do their thing. Occasionally some of the branches will escape the cage and you might have to support them, but it's pretty easy. As far as making these really big cattle panel cages, I did a video on that recently and I'll put a link to that. The downside of the cages is what we've seen is you tend to get a pretty dense plant. We do prune a little bit to try to improve air flow, but we do see more disease in our environment. June was really, really rainy on the tomatoes that are in cages. We have three of the same variety right here, and actually a fourth one just on the other bed over there. This variety is Beefy Red. It's new for us this year. We had heard really good things about it and honestly it did not disappoint. I don't have any ripe ones to pick right now, but I will put up a video kind of showing us slicing into one. Just a really amazing looking tomato. It's got these kind of yellow and then red striations all over the top, but then the inside is just sort of a uniform beefsteak red interior that tastes really good. We've moved over a little bit because we have a few more tomato cages. This one is Purple Zebra, also new for us. Really, really tasty. We ate some the other night. Only thing with it, it's kind of an odd size, so it's not quite a cherry tomato. It's a little too big to just kind of pop in your mouth, but then it's not that substantial for slicing, say on a burger or things like that. We also have two more cages and we're comparing Sun Sugar versus Sun Gold. That was a suggestion that we got from a lot of you guys. I think we'll do a blind taste test here coming up maybe as a short to see which one is the sweeter or better tasting tomato. Since we're on the topic of tomatoes, we have our paste tomatoes here. These are all grown in straw bales. We have 30 plants in kind of three different 15 foot rows. We plant two tomato plants per straw bale. We've been doing the straw bale tomatoes for our paste tomatoes for quite some time now. These are supported using a bent cattle panel and that system has worked really, really well for us and so we'll continue to do that. We always plant our paste tomatoes a little bit later than our other tomatoes and then generally late July, early August we can do a big harvest. These are determinate tomatoes, so they're bush type, which tend to put up most of their fruit all at once. That allows us to kind of batch process our tomato sauce. Because the paste tomatoes are so important, we can quite a lot of tomato sauce every year. In fact, there's a video that we did last season that I can link to kind of going over some of the process that we did. The paste tomatoes are really important. We always trial a few different varieties. They're always determinate paste style tomatoes and I'll go over that in a future video, kind of what the best one of this season was. We don't quite have ripe tomatoes, so I can't make that assessment quite yet. Let's go ahead and look at some of the peppers we're growing as well. Not far from the paste tomatoes we have all of our poblano style peppers. These are our favorite peppers, so we have a few more of these than some of the other peppers. We just harvested quite a lot of these actually and the way we like to preserve them is just to cut them into little pieces and then put them on a cookie sheet to freeze and then you can put them all in a gallon bag. You don't need to do any blanching. It's honestly super easy and they're really good throughout the winter for making, you know, salsas, pozole soup, things like that. There's a few different types of poblano style peppers. It's always, again, one of our favorites that we like to compare and we just did a decent harvest here but we're already getting new peppers coming up. As far as supports, we've got these cattle panels here. There's two of them and then I just have these t-posts in sort of a v-type shape and this is a really good system as far as supporting the peppers. Our other peppers are in one of our 4 by 12 foot raised beds. Some of the varieties we're growing are mellow star shishito. That's been our favorite shishito for a few years going. Super prolific. The carmen sweet peppers, we grew these in the past and then we stopped growing them for a year or two just because they're a little bit harder to use with cooking versus sort of the blocky bell type peppers but we came back to them because of how prolific and tasty they are. I think they're even sweeter than the standard bell peppers. Speaking of standard bell peppers, two different types we're growing. One is red knight and honestly I've been super impressed with how huge these bell peppers are. I mean these are massive bell peppers and then the other is crispy hybrid sweet. We grew that last year. They are also really good but a smaller bell pepper. Other peppers we have in this bed, we've got two types of jalapenos. There's four jalapeno plants. We have so many jalapenos that we definitely did not need to do that but the two types are san joaquin hybrid as well as ringleader. Almost forgot one more pepper in this bed, orange blaze. Interestingly on the package it made it seem like it was more of a orange bell type pepper but the reality is is that they're really more of a elongated shape so but they're really good. We like them. I like to pack them in my lunch. A really good kind of snacking sweet pepper. Still has the thick walls similar to a bell pepper. Right next door to the peppers we have our onions. Let's talk about those. We actually harvested half of our onions already. In the past we've just grown one four by twelve foot bed of onions but we did run out and so we decided to grow two four by twelve foot beds this year. Over here you can see an empty bed. We just recently harvested all of these onions. That was kind of a mixed onions and we did a video on that kind of going over frequently asked questions and growing tips so I'll put a link to that video there. On this side these are our long day onions so onions will bulb based on day length. A lot of these were medium day length onions so they were ready sooner. The long day onions take a little bit longer to mature but what you can see in the bed a lot of these are sort of flopping over and so these are just getting ready to harvest now. In fact if we look right here this one's kind of flopped over. I'll pull these out. All this bed are Patterson onions and so these are our yellow kind of long storage onions and we have an entire bed of these. These last us a good 10-11 months depending on how they cure and it's looking like a pretty good year for them. So I'll probably get harvesting these relatively soon. We cure these in the barn. That's where the other onions are currently and when you're harvesting stuff in the middle of the summer it might be important to have a crop that goes in afterwards to succession plant. We did that actually recently with kind of an early summer late spring harvest of our broccoli and cauliflower. So let's look at the next bed over. One of our go-to succession plantings after harvest are bush beans. So these are all provider bush beans and they were planted I think it was early June so it's been about a month or so since they've been in the ground and they followed our broccoli and cauliflower. So the nice thing about bush beans and a bunch of things that are nice really one of those is that they're very easy to direct so so you can just sow them in the middle of the summer without having to start anything and transplant. They fix nitrogen so they'll be able to kind of add a little bit of nutrition back into the beds and then it's just a really nice transition because they mature so quickly generally about two months or so and lots of times if you have a long enough season you're able to get these in after your broccoli and cauliflower and you'll still have time to plant your brassicas back in as well. For our zucchini two varieties kefirin and golden glory. The golden glory we've grown a few years in a row and we really really like it has kind of a yellow zucchini now we prefer that to some of the other yellow squash like the crookneck squash. One thing about zucchini is there's quite a lot of pests they're probably the easiest plant to grow but they also have some of the most number of pests and oftentimes you'll lose your zucchini to squash vine borer part late part way through the season here in Ohio and so we have a strategy for that we grow a succession plant in another bed. Now this bed also has zucchini in it but you can see there's netting over the top of it and so what we like to do is this actually had our garlic so we harvested this in mid-June so a little less than a month ago and then I just direct some bush beans as well as zucchini into this bed. We keep this cover on until the plants are mature and they're producing both male and female flowers and that way when those other plants finally succumb to all the pest pressure we've got a new fresh kind of vigorous plant to replace it. A lot of the pests of zucchini even though eventually especially squash vine borer can prove fatal it does take a little while so basically once those die if we open this up even if we get that pest pressure we're going to get a good two months of harvest before anything happens to these plants and lots of times they'll actually last the whole rest of the season. So this is a strategy that works really well for us as far as having zucchini throughout the growing season. For our sweet corn we like to succession plant these so this one here it was planted about two weeks before the one behind. You can see up here this one is tasseling and kind of forming corn whereas we don't see that quite yet on the one behind here and we just can't quite eat all of this sweet corn so it works out better for us to have kind of a set that comes in and then a few weeks later another set that comes in. We found corn works just a little bit better in ground versus in the raised beds. The raised bed soil is really really fluffy and really loose and corn doesn't have super deep roots and it being so tall in that loose soil it has a tendency to fall over in the wind for us and so this works a little bit better. This year I created two sort of mounded beds and there's a little walkway between. You can't quite see it here because of how big the corn is but we're getting pretty close to having corn. Hopefully we get it this year. One of the things you can see down here is an electric fence and we battle raccoons every year with our sweet corn and so we're really hoping that we win that battle this year and get to enjoy our corn. Next to the corn we have something that's new for us this year. This is bottle gourd and a local friend gave us the seeds to try. He says in his native India they eat them very similar to how you would eat a summer squash when you pick them small but then you can let them get bigger into more of a elongated gourd as well. They have these really delicate white flowers and I'm really happy with how this turned out. I had my peas here on this trellis and I planted two gourds on either side and ended up timing it really well where they had established and just started getting bigger just at the time when the peas came off. Two beds back this way on your left side we have the asparagus and you can see obviously we're just letting this grow at this point. One thing I do advise with asparagus these get really tall just put some sort of fencing around it so it doesn't lean over and break or fall into your pathways. We are dealing with some asparagus beetles here we kind of deal with that every year but it doesn't seem to affect the yields too much. Only thing I'd say with the asparagus is that I sort of wish I had planted it in ground rather than and then in one of the raised beds. I haven't decided but I might actually try to move it in the dormant season to more of an in-ground bed so I can use the raised bed for annual plants rather than a perennial like asparagus. Over on your right side we have a mixed bed we have basil we have butternut squash kind of growing along these cattle panels. Waltham is our favorite butternut squash. One of the things you can see on the butternut squash is some of the skin looks a little bit potch marked and that's just because we deal with so many cucumber beetles that they will often nibble a little bit on the skin and luckily it doesn't seem to affect the storage or the you know fruit inside when you're actually cooking it. One last bed to go over just right in front of me and that has our pole beans as well as our eggplant. This bed here has four eggplants two varieties one is Orient Express the other is Thanos. Honestly it has been such a prolific eggplant year we just picked out two 10 gallon buckets of eggplant and we're having all sorts of different eggplant dishes and we're experimenting with preserving it this year by grilling it and then cubing it and then seeing if we can freeze it in a little bit of oil. Our hope is that we can make something that the texture doesn't matter too much like a baba ganoush type recipe. Behind us we have our pole beans in fact looks like we are just getting ready to start harvesting these. Interesting thing about this I planted some but also a lot of these are self-sowed. We planted pole beans here last season as well and we had a bunch that were kind of hanging on the vines and they dropped and grew right in there. The other thing that's nice about having the pole beans here is we do get just a little bit of afternoon shade for the tomatoes behind us and as we get into the really hot part of the season that seems to be a really good thing for them. We've got a few things in this shot one is we have our dinosaur kale does look like we have to get some bt sprayed on there because I'm starting to see a little bit of damage from the cabbage worms. We've got our strawberries. Strawberries just need a little bit of maintenance there done for the season and generally you like to kind of mow those down to reduce disease next year and then up this way we've got a few things this is kind of a new bed setup over here. We have our blueberries which are in these half wine barrels that is new this year. We were finding that the strawberries and the raspberries which are on the other side were out competing the blueberries so we're trying to get them a little bit more protected space and then I had saved a bunch of dahlia tubers so I have dahlias kind of interspersed throughout here as well. Speaking of raspberries our raspberry patch is right next to the blueberries and we've got some wire trellising kind of holding them up because a lot of them had sort of invaded their roots down into the blueberry patch this year I did sort of a hard reset on those took out a lot of the roots that are in the pathway that I'm standing in I mowed them all down. The type of varieties of raspberries we have are what are called primocane bearing raspberries in that they will bear fruit on the canes that come up this year and that fruit generally happens more towards the later end of the season in fact we're starting to get some fruit now but the bulk of it will happen all the way into September time frame. These varieties will also bear fruit on second year canes meaning these ones that you can see here if we let them over winter they'll bear fruit early in the season next year but this year I had just cut them all down and so we're only going to get kind of one flush of raspberries in the late season. We're starting to get into the more wild section of the gardens there's a few things to talk about down here but just in front of me we have some petunias and ground cherries the type of ground cherry we're growing this year is Aunt Molly's and we've actually really liked it we grew Goldie last year had a little bit more of that tomatoey aftertaste whereas the Aunt Molly's pretty much just pure sweet and the kids really like it. We've got a couple cherry trees behind us a lot of the stone fruit had kind of a tough winter this year and so we didn't get fruit this year but hopefully next year we will and then let's go look at speaking of stone fruit let's go look at the peaches behind us to be honest I really need to summer prune them they're getting a little big. We have four different peach trees in the fruit tree orchard and they are doing really really well growing like crazy in fact I really should summer prune them but I've been waiting for an opportunity where we had a stretch of dry weather in fact we have a pretty decent stretch of dry weather this week so I might get in here and summer prune these unfortunately we didn't get any peaches this year that seemed to be true in a lot of areas in the country just because of some late freezes and that's one of the issues growing stone fruit in Ohio is we do tend to have kind of warm-ups and then freezes that often will kill the developing fruit. The flowers that you see in front of me are burning hearts heliopsis they're a perennial they have spread a decent amount just super pretty and they will have flowers pretty much the majority of the summer. I really like the dark foliage as well really my only complaint with them is they are pretty tall and so we just had a decent rainstorm and they kind of flopped over can't see that from this view but I have some yarrow and some other flowers kind of in this area and then behind me I have some more stone fruit those are my plums. The plum trees are also in need of a summer pruning this one is a Stanley plum which is a European style plum this one's a little bit more predictable to grow here in Ohio whereas this one is an Aeurosa plum which is a Japanese style plum tends to have a pretty early bloom time and so even worse than the peaches often will get hit by late frost. In front of me I have a patch of petunias and tomatillos. Initially I had the tomatillos in those flimsy little tomato cages they all just flopped over and at this point I think I would damage the plants if I tried to upright them so next year I think I'll put these more in those v-shaped trellises that you saw the peppers in. Now here in the orchard one of the things that stands out is we have these tent looking things here these are our carving pumpkins we're growing the champion variety the reason they're in these tents is to protect them from pests and specifically squash vine borer in the early season. I've timed these hopefully correctly this year where we'll have carving pumpkins that will be fresh and ready to carve for Halloween. The orchard has been probably the toughest thing about the season this year. We lost two apple trees completely and one pear tree completely to fire blight. Other plants have been severely hacked back and we will see whether or not they will survive the winter and continue to grow and we lost those all to fire blight which is a bacterial disease. I did a video about that so if you're interested in it you can see kind of what that is what it looks like and what to do about it although there's not great options besides just picking resistant varieties. This olympic pear for example so far I've seen no fire blight on it whereas other pears have been absolutely devastated. One plant that did not get attacked by any sort of pest or disease because they rarely do are the figs. We grow our figs in 30 gallon grow bags that way we can bring them into the barn in the winter and because of that we're way ahead as far as fig production. We should get a lot of right figs before the season is over. Down here I have four native pawpaw trees. I planted these from seed harvesting them from the local canyons and I'm excited about these. They are very slow growing. This is I think their third year but you know they're still pretty short. What I've read is that they send out a pretty deep tap root initially and then they'll kind of put on a lot of other growth. We've got some pretty big trees just on your left here my right and that faces west so I think this is a pretty ideal position for them where they get morning sun and afternoon shade. I'm pretty proud of these here these are our rhubarb. We started these from seed this season. The variety is Victoria and I know a lot of people will buy already established plants but you can start rhubarb from seed. It's the first time we did it and obviously very very successful. We're really happy to have it. Again this is in the same area as the pawpaws so we get that afternoon shade and I think the rhubarb will do very very well here. It might be hard to tell in the video but I'm going downhill to this area. This has been kind of my big scale hugelkultur area. We had a decent slope here. I added a large number of old logs, wood chips, other things and it's been a few years now and now the soil down here is doing really well. In fact the pumpkins are absolutely loving it. Believe it or not there's only two pumpkin plants behind me but they have gotten huge. The two varieties are long island cheese and muskie de provence. Both of those are in the sea muscata species and so they're more related to butternut and are slightly resistant to squash vine borer. You can see I have a couple cattle panels here that's just because this was the only place I could establish a walkway. Just some other determinate tomato plants. Hillary was just wondering what the heck are we going to do with more tomatoes but any gardener knows it's hard to throw them away if you've grown them from seed so they found a home here. And then we have all of our sweet potatoes down this way. You can't see them but there's straw bales down here which is how we grow our sweet potatoes in the straw. We're also growing our cucumbers, melons and watermelon in straw just over here. On your right we have the cucumbers. These have been producing a ton for us. Cucumbers are notoriously kind of short-lived plants at least here where we are and so they're not doing great at this point but we've got more than enough cucumbers and pickles that we made. Two standout varieties. One unagi. I've talked about that one in the past for fresh eating. That's definitely my favorite. And then we tried excelsior which is over here for pickling. Super great variety. Also parthenocarpic and gynoecious meaning it only makes female flowers and doesn't need a pollinator. And what we found is it's really good to get those going early season. Get a big crop of them because it becomes harder and harder later on as disease and pests especially cucumber beetles start to ramp up. Over on your left side here this is a huge patch of watermelon. The watermelon varieties we're growing are onza and big tasty. Those are both seedless so we have a couple ace watermelon in here to pollinate and obviously that's been successful because we have watermelon strewn throughout here. We probably have about 20 or so watermelon here. Just in front a little bit this way on your right these are all of our melons. Favorite melon is sugar cube of the cantaloupe style melons but then we also have a torpedo style melon that we really like. I think this one's Korean giant. It's kind of a yellow melon. It has a white crispy flesh. Kind of tastes like a hybrid between a cucumber and a cantaloupe. This huge mound here also is a couple pumpkin plants. Same varieties as we saw before. This was a compost pile and I had a couple extra plants so I put them here and now they're just sort of taking over the world. Really only issue is trying to make sure that we actually still have walkways to get through. So I've been trying to guide the vines into more of the orchard area. Right here this is one of the apple trees. We do have a decent number of apple trees in the garden. Some of the ones did okay with the fire blight but this one is a pristine and it got hacked back pretty hard. I will say that's definitely been the most disappointing thing of the season so far was sort of starting off losing a lot of the orchard because I really thought that this season would be kind of the season that the investment and the time and the energy put into the orchard would pay off. Down here given some partial shade by the asparagus ferns we've got our ginger. Ginger was a little slow this year but it looks like it's starting to take off so we're excited to get ginger again. We still have frozen ginger from last year. We did make a video kind of going over how we grew it and so I can put a link for that but we're really excited about ginger. I'm really happy to have it kind of as part of our standard things that we grow every year. As I evolve as a gardener one of the things I've added more and more of are flowers in the garden. In fact I kind of see a future where I start reducing the amount of vegetables and increasing the amount of flowers because every year Hillary and I look and see what have we grown what do we really want to grow as far as food goes again and what really did we grow too much of and sometimes we're just giving a lot of things away and we better just have beauty of flowers and the benefit of the flowers in the garden. Behind us we have cleome or spider flowers those are one of our favorite. I've talked about those in the past they self-seed every year. Other flowers we have in the garden are these purple hyacinth beans, we have amaranth along the fence line, we have snap dragons although it's getting a little hot for them this time of year and along the beds I like to have things like petunias or calabrocha that sort of trail over the sides. I can hear some baby birds in the bird box right here. Well that concludes the full summer tour we've come full circle we're back at the beginning of the garden these black eyed susans this native honeysuckle kind of cascading over the entrance. Thank you all for coming along with me we are so humbled by all the support and the people that have watched us as we grew this garden and we look forward to enjoying more tours and taking along with them in the future. Happy gardening everyone!