Summer Garden Update (Year Two in the New Raised Beds)

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Summer Garden Updates

This is our second year in our new metal raised beds. And this year we added 9 new beds — making our garden complete with 30 raised beds.

The biggest focus of the garden this year has been on getting the raised beds set up, filled and established with healthy soil and plants. Next year, our focus will be on the pathways, beautifying the space more, and possibly new fencing.

→ See last year’s raised bed summer garden tour here.

Some of the raised beds came with built in arches and garden cover – which is great getting plants established and protecting against garden pests.

I wrote a bit about the raised beds we use in these posts:

Supporting the Pollinators

I love adding a mix of flowers in with our veggie plants inside of the raised beds — not only for beauty, but also to attract pollinators to the garden.

We even have a specific cut flower garden set up in the raised beds.

This has also been the year of sunflowers. Some of these we planted from seed this year, and others were volunteers from last year that I allowed to grow again.

The garden has been humming with a variety of pollinators all summer long. And as in years past, I leave the sunflowers up through the end of the season because it attracts the birds to the seeds left behind during the winter months.

It is such a treat for all of us to watch the variety of birds — especially my favorite blue jays — come to the garden during the cold months.

Cut Flower Garden Bounty

Another great joy from the garden is continuous bouquets of fresh flowers all season long.

In this post, I go into great detail of the variety of plants and flowers that we love and recommend for a cut flower garden.

If you’re interested in started your own cut flower garden (easily) from seeds, I highly recommend reading that post.

Variety of Trellises & Uses

Certain plants perform better and require trellising to thrive.

We’ve added new cattle panel trellises to a few of the raised beds for the tomatoes to grow up. This has worked well for us and I will continue this in future years for the tomatoes.

Read more about how we set up the cattle panel arch trellises.

cucumber plant climbing cattle panel arch.

In addition to the vegetables that are growing on the trellises, we have a variety of flowers.

We’ve established cattle panel archways at the entrances of the garden. And on these we have a climbing rose and at the other end is wisteria (which I neglected to capture a photo of while it was in bloom. Sigh…😔)

I’ll have to remember to take photos of the wisteria for next year’s summer garden update!

Until then, here are the lovely climbing roses in bloom on the cattle panel arch at the other entrance.