From the Garden: Late Spring at the Wild Rose Homestead

Spring is in full swing at the Wild Rose Homestead. Here's a few scenes from the farm:

Our Rose bushes are covered in beautiful, bright blooms! We harvest just a portion of  these for our Attunement Balancing Facial Mask and Bloom Muscle Rub. The rest are left for the bees.

Our mixed flower/herb bed of poppies, mint, borage and calendula flourished every year. We also added a young apple tree that will one day offer shade.

We started the last of our veggie seeds including this beautiful Cassiopeia popcorn offered by Siskiyou Seeds. We'll be growing this in a traditional Three Sisters bed with winter squash and beans.

The greenhouse is packed full of veggies, flowers and herbs! We used the last of our excess jar boxes from Wild Rose to start sunflowers and hollyhocks.

An early June harvest of rose petals, calendula, mulberries, strawberries, cherries and red clover! Our array of veggies, fruits and herbs grow together harmoniously, improving the soil to produce more potent herbs for Wild Rose.

The Summer Garden at Wild Rose

Summer is here in Southern Oregon and our permaculture gardens are exploding with fresh food and herbs! We grow all of our own Calendula and Yarrow in our annual veggie gardens because they are wonderful allies for our food crops. They attract beneficial insects, improve flavor and keep the soil healthy. 

This is a first year garden on our new homestead. We established this garden using the lasagna gardening method with the help of a couple loads of rich, USDA organic compost. Our compost is from Southern Oregon Compost, a local company that reclaims local waste and transform it into black gold.

Calendula is perfect paired with tomatoes. Our tomatoes aren't quite ripe, but we are sure to have an epic crop this year!

We also practice bio-intensive gardening which combines beneficial crops into the same bed to best utilize space and increase yields. Here, our early kale plants are using space not yet taken up by our young squash. Lettuce also fills unused space as the squash grows.

When establishing our garden, we left this large wild Yarrow patch intact. I was surprised to see it bloom in hues of pink - a color only found in ornamental and high elevation varieties. This beautiful bunch will provide us with Yarrow for many years to come!

From the Garden: Recycled Box Seedling Pots

We go through a lot of jars at Wild Rose, which means we go through a lot of jar boxes! Jar boxes are typically small with corrugated partitions to protect jars during shipping. These boxes aren't very useful for storage or garden mulch, so we've started using them for seedlings. We save all of our jar boxes through the busy Winter shopping season for our Spring seedlings, leaving the partitions in place to prevent neighboring seedlings from intertwining their roots.

The boxes degrade quickly, so we simply start our seeds in them before potting up. The seedling above are tomatoes that are just about ready to be transplanted to larger pots. The spent seedling boxes are then composted with the rest of our household/workshop plant waste.