Our garden open house (rain or shine) is THIS coming Saturday!

APPALACHIAN FEET GARDEN OPEN HOUSE DETAILS:
Drop-in June 14th, 9:00am – 5:00pm
Recommended donation of $2-$5
440 Summit Drive, Greenville, SC

You may also want to catch Eliza’s TEDx presentation at Zen on Tuesday, June 17th at 5:30pm. Additionally, Eliza wrote the feature article (on pawpaws) in the latest Edible Upcountry magazine, available for free at area locations like the Swamp Rabbit Cafe & Grocery, The Carolina Honeybee Company, or The Community Tap.

Our plans for the garden open house are not as far along as we expected at this point — partly due to Eliza’s busy speaking and landscape consulting schedule this past spring, but mainly due to another pregnancy and recurrent miscarriage. Last Monday we went to a first trimester appointment and Eliza began miscarrying during the ultrasound. We decided to mention it because miscarriages are so common and so rarely talked about (1 in 4 pregnancies ends in miscarriage). It would be nice if society was a little better informed. We’re doing better this time around but appreciate all the optimistic sympathy we’ve received.

Here’s what we know for sure will be available to view at the garden open house (June 14th, 9:00am-5:00pm):

• A Q&A tent where Eliza & Nathaniel will answer your questions (& likely refreshment stand)
• Lawn-free edible landscaping, especially in the front yard, featuring guilds, microclimates, and hundreds of plant species
• Unusual perennial food crops for the southeast
• Lots of hugelkultur examples
• Keyhole bed design
• Sheet mulching/deep mulching & soil ecology
• Water catchment swales in pathways
• Edible mushroom farming
• Pallet gardens
• Farmscaping (Thorough organic pest control through attracting a complete ecosystem)
• Chickens, chicken coop, & run (which contains a hawk deterring “fedge” — aka food hedge)
• Black soldier fly waste composting and chicken feed
• Worm bin composting
• Cold composting
• Live fermentation and canning displays
• Seed saving display
• Mildly grouchy honeybees that occasionally send a lone guard to chase us around — we’ll let you view the apiary from a distance (or you can just stay in the front yard if you feel concerned). We’ll be requeening our hives with more peaceful stock soon.
• The beginnings of our first pond (under construction)
• The beginnings of our duck run (under construction, no ducks yet)
• Part of an herb spiral (we may finish it before this weekend)
• Our personal micro-nursery
• A 5th generation (for our family) passalong pomegranate tree in full bloom
• Detailed plans about our eventual goals for the property and the chance to see it in progress

We may add a little bit more to the list before Saturday if health and time permit. Here’s a sneak peak at the front yard garden, which is the only thing that is nearly finished:

We are so happy with our front hugelkultur beds! Eliza has had to water a lot due to adding many new seeds and plants (you have to keep them watered until their roots reach deep down into the composting wood reservoir). However, the plants we established last year are utterly drought-proof. They’re also expressing their approval of hugeling by growing absurdly large — one bed has a Phlox paniculata ‘David’ that is already 6′ tall and does not appear to be stopping any time soon.

You may remember the above garden view from this process photo post when we were adding the hugels last year. Here is what it looks like a year later — still not completely mature but everything is filling in nicely.

We knew hugelkultur was reputed to be nature’s irrigation system, but we couldn’t believe how much easier it made growing finicky plants like ostrich ferns, rhubarb, and gooseberries.

We like to choose edible species that are also ornamental.

Ever consider eating our native spiderworts? Here’s how.

The overwhelming majority of neighbors who stop to chat about our garden are very complimentary. A few days after these photos were taken we did have one woman inform us that we have a lot of weeds… guess the cottage garden look isn’t for everyone! Perhaps it was a misunderstanding since we grow so many species she may not recognize. Eliza wanted to ask which plants she thought were weeds but the lady crossed to the other side of the street on her way back past our house.

Usually we get questions about specific plants and people wanting to know how to do similar gardens in their own yard. Eliza was gratified a few days ago when she overheard a Spanish-speaking man point to the edible opuntia cactus near the road and excitedly say, “Nopales!” to his friend.

We consider beauty to have its own uses in the garden and not everything we grow is there for us to harvest. We’ve enjoyed the recent addition of some benches, a tea cart, potted plants and other small hardscaping elements.

The garden is constantly changing, partly because we are often letting food plants go to seed. The honeybees worked our flowering brassicas like kale, turnips, collards, arugula, and radishes hard during the spring. Eventually we replaced them with summer plantings (usually when they start smothering their neighbors or finishing their life cycles).

Sometimes we use our perennials as makeshift trellies — snow and sugar snap peas obliged us by climbing our native oakleaf hydrangea and redbud tree.

Other plants are there for the bugs. When we want specific insects to help balance out the garden we use farmscaping techniques by finding out what they prefer to eat and planting it. Insect pest control has never been less work!

We’re still thankful to Anna and Mark at The Walden Effect for giving us our now fully established black raspberries, red raspberries, and thornless blackberries. So far not a single berry has made it into the house.

Our brambles (raspberries and blackberries) line the driveway between a cinderblock wall and a barricade of straw bales. We like how the berries fill in between these 2 barriers and blocks all the light (and thus weeds) that grow underneath them.

During Eliza’s pregnancy she wasn’t allowed to dig new beds. As a result, she started triaging all the vegetable starts by sticking them anywhere there was enough light and space in a pre-prepared bed.

Tall flowering plants like snapdragons, veronicas, foxgloves, agastaches, salvias, and penstemons add structure to the garden and food for beneficial insects.

Eliza has been trying to relocate any orange and red flowering plants to the backyard in order to maintain a cool color scheme. There’s some stragglers but she’s getting close to reaching that goal.

In order to keep soil off the sidewalk, we used the most inexpensive material we could think of for a retaining wall — our neighbor’s discarded logs and woody debris. Some of it is quite sculptural and a few even have edible oyster mushrooms that fruit from them. The mushrooms pictured above are not a culinary variety.

The plants will continue to fill in and help define the keyhole pattern of our beds vs. our mulched pathways.

Since we don’t have a lawn it was never convenient to haul out a lawnmower for the grassy verge between the sidewalk and the road. Last fall we replaced it with white clover so that we only have to weed. We bookended either end with comfrey — a great weed barrier so our neighbor won’t have to keep clover out of his grass and vice versa.

We love to use native plants whenever possible. The dozens of species in our front yard includes mountain mint, sedum, hearts-a-bustin’, oakleaf hydrangea, clethra, piedmont azalea, northern river oats, woodland phlox, jack-in-the-pulpit, coreopsis, and pawpaw trees — our largest native fruit.

We also use a variety of exotic species that do not show aggressive tendencies.

Eliza likes to find at least one new-to-her plant each season. She’d never seen pink cuphea before.

We decided not to let our lettuce go to seed in the front yard because it looks like a weed to many people. We’re letting it and other unruly looking plants bloom and produce seed in the backyard instead.

Many people never stop and really see a garden. We hope ours will turn some heads.

Sterile comfrey is well used in our landscape with some borders and individual plantings. It’s amazing how fast it grows and how great it is as a chop and drop fertilizer plant.

If any of this has piqued your interest we’d love to see you at the garden open house this coming Saturday, bring a friend!

APPALACHIAN FEET GARDEN OPEN HOUSE DETAILS:
Drop-in June 14th, 9:00am – 5:00pm
Recommended donation of $2-$5
440 Summit Drive, Greenville, SC