2021 Summer garden tour

THE FARMHOUSE

a look around this year's garden | www.thegritandpolish.com

Three years into our Farmhouse garden and I think we’re finally hitting our stride! Gardening is such a fun hobby for me and every year I learn a little bit more and feel a little bit more confident. This year’s garden is definitely our best to date! It’s colorful (SO many flowers!), vibrant, producing, and a total pleasure to spend time in…both for gardening and relaxing! So today I wanted to show you around our summer 2021 garden.

* this post is sponsored by Monrovia!

umbrella | other garden sources here

It’s been a few years since renovated this space (you can read more about that here) and we use it all the time! We eat most of our summer meals out here on the weathered table that Garrett and I built when we lived in Seattle out of wood beams found at a salvage shop and a rented planer from Home Depot. It’s about 3’ x 9’ so fits all of our family and then some.

The outdoor furniture is also a mainstay of our summer. It’s our evening hangout spot and there’s something really magical about turning on the string lights, listening to the owls hoot and the crickets chirp, and watching the sun go down.

And of course there’s the plants themselves…

This year we planted a lot of flowers. I focused on easy-to-grow varieties that produce a lot of blooms, anchored by 4 of Monrovia’s Sunbelievable Brown Eyed Girl (the bright yellow blooms shown above). We worked with Monrovia to pick these beauties out, recommended for their drought-tolerance, vibrant colors, and epic bloom count (1000 blooms per plant!). They just flower and flower from Spring until first frost.

I selected the other flowers in the garden after that, choosing mostly yellows, whites, peaches, and warm pink tones to complement the brown eyed girls. The other notable flowers in this year’s garden are cosmos, zinnia, soapwort, bupleurum, Chinese forget me not, clarkia, dahlias, marigolds, and snapdragons.

I LOVE having lots of flowers in the garden! They’re colorful and enticing and you wouldn’t believe all the butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees they’ve attracted! A reader told me that “vegetables nurture the body and flowers nurture the soul” and I couldn’t agree more :)

As far as fruits and veggies go, we had a lot of success with our cherry and pear tree this year and the raspberry harvest was our best to date. In the beds we planted rhubarb, greens, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, pumpkin, and a variety of herbs. We mostly stuck to plants we’ve had success with in the past to keep things low maintenance this year. We also have all the beds on drip irrigation with an automatic timer to make sure they get a healthy dose of water every morning.

BTW, Garrett’s garden bed cover has been working wonders this summer. The lettuce has nary a nibble on them…take that birds!