COTTAGE GARDEN TOUR 🪴

I have had a lot of requests to show you guys some kind of garden tour and I know we kind of do one every year but this year our garden has changed a ton so we are excited to walk you guys through the garden and show you all the different changes. It is still a vegetable garden however we did mix in a lot of flowers and we gave it a whole different vibe. I'm actually going to have Thomas walk you guys through the garden. He is the one that does everything when it comes to the garden. He plants everything, he waters everything, he harvests everything. So when it comes to gardens that's actually not something that I even really help him with. One other thing I want to show you guys our cottage, what is it? Our cottage shed. It looks like a straight-up cottage and I just want to move in but it's our shed where we keep all of our tools so you know. For those who have not seen our shed before it used to be this green color and we wanted to give it a little bit of a facelift this summer so we painted it and then Thomas built this amazing porch with brick pavers and then used old barn wood to build this pergola. I love how this turned out so much. It looks like it's always been here. You would never think that this was brand new as of a few months ago but using those old materials really gives it that old rustic look and then he brought in some pavers from our front yard to create a path to the shed and I just absolutely love this whole area now. This gate is actually from my grandpa's farm so we wanted to incorporate it into our backyard and I can't wait to show you another big way we used my grandpa's barn wood in our garden this year. And then if you walk down this path next to our shed this is where our stream is. I don't share this area very often but our stream is one of my favorite spots in our yard. Before we get to the tour I would like to thank Marlo for sponsoring today's video. Today's video is sponsored by Marlo and Marlo is an amazing pillow brand company designed to give you a better night's sleep. One of the things that makes their pillow so unique is they are infused with extra chill cooling foam which for me personally I love because I do not like when my pillow feels really hot so the fact that this stays cool while you are sleeping is a huge deal for me. Another thing is this zipper detail that allows you to adjust the firmness based on your own personal preference. So if you are someone who prefers a more firm pillow then you would just keep your pillow zipped and if you are someone like me who loves a really plushy soft pillow then you would want to keep your pillow unzipped. I have the standard size but they do have a king size as well and they have really awesome deals where the more you buy the more you save. For instance if you buy two pillows you'll save 20% if you buy four pillows you'll save 30% plus you can add an additional 10% off by using my link in the description. What I have personally noticed since sleeping on this pillow is I have not had to wake up one time to do the whole pillow flip where I feel like that's something I did almost every single night where halfway through the night I would feel so hot that I'd have to wake up and flip my pillow over but with this pillow I have not once felt like it was getting hot. So that cooling foam is such a huge deal for me. I didn't realize how big of a deal it was that I've been waking up every night just to flip my pillow. I hate that I've had to do that. So for that reason alone I love this pillow. I swear by this pillow. So if you're someone like me who hates getting hot from your pillow in the night you need to switch over to this one. But aside from that I feel like this is just the coziest fluffiest pillow. Like it's perfect for me and my husband likes one that's a little bit more firm so he keeps his zipped up. This is truly the perfect pillow for anybody. It is completely risk-free to try. They even have a 365 day risk-free policy. Plus they offer a two-year warranty if you're not absolutely happy with your purchase. So there is no risk for you to try it. Be sure to click the link in my description to get your own Marlowe pillow. I know you are going to love it. Years ago I had watched a video on a master class teacher that had to do with gardens and I didn't know what about the video intrigued me. So every year I did a garden I didn't like the end result. I know it still looked pretty but I was like something's missing. This year I finally realized I saw the ad again. It was like a three-minute ad on YouTube. I watched the whole thing and it reminded me of what inspired me to have a garden. And the words I would use are chaotic beauty. It's pretty but there's chaos to it and there's no like symmetry to it and so I kept expanding my garden and making it bigger. I would do symmetrical garden boxes and they'd be next to each other and that's how I would continue to do it. And so I ripped out every garden box this year and I just kind of just went with the flow and did whatever I wanted. So there is not like okay tomatoes are here, pumpkins are here, squash are here. It's kind of just everything's everywhere. These rocks I just dug out of our river creek bed and as I planted them I wanted to do the clover and grass seed in between it which turned out exactly how I wanted according to the pictures that's on Pinterest. So I didn't pay any money for these rocks. I just gathered them up from around my yard and in the creek bed and I mixed the clover seed with grass seed and it allows you to walk on it without it being destroyed. So you have to mix grass with it to make it durable enough to walk on but it worked out exactly how I wanted. And I will tell you guys it grew in like two weeks. It was fully like from seed to this. It looked like this in two weeks. Also don't ever fertilize it because the clover seed produces nitrogen on its own and if you fertilize it it gives it too much and it will kill all of it. So don't fertilize the clover seed and you water half as much as you would typically water grass. Hey! Oh that's so cute. Now get! We love the look of split rail fencing. So he did like a miniature one here where he has some lights hung on it and I love it. It's like a fence for a gnome. A gnome. We have gnomes that live here. If you let these just grow they will literally, clovers will grow three feet tall before they start to fall over. So I let it get too high and so when I did go back and clip it it was very yellow at the bottom. So now I maintain it a lot and instead of letting it grow over these pavers that I went and grabbed from, they're flagstone pavers. I grabbed them from my front yard. We have like this pathway that we never use and I was like well I'll just use those. But I bought these clippers and I started just trimming up around the rock just to keep it clean. And so if you don't maintain it, it will just cover all the rocks and you'll never see them. So chives are perennial so they grow back every year. So I've actually had this plant. It used to be over there. I've had this plant for probably five years. Since you started. Yeah. Five years. Yeah. So if you ever want chives. Well and here I am thinking those were green onions this whole time. Do you see what I mean? I am NOT your gal when it comes to gardens. I do know this is broccoli though only because he just told me it was. The reason this specific plant is so much taller is because I saw a picture of a broccoli plant that looked like a tree and it was like this tall with a broccoli head on the top of it. And so I started to do that but then Ashley was like it looks way cooler when it's lower. And I had already messed up by that point and so this one's much taller because of that. So as you do that it shoots the life to the stem and just makes it way girthy and taller. Whereas these ones I didn't and so they're they're a lot. I didn't even know I said that. Sorry about that. I think it looks cool. Well I mean I would just have these really tall trees right here. I just figured out as I go. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the way we do it. I also love that he put a border of more rocks. You see that? Like it's a step up right there. And so again he just found these in our yard. So that was pretty cool. And I'm sure you can guess what this is. That's our corn. Look how tall that is. I feel like I've been doing a good job. I mean it's June. That is huge. It's actually pretty wild to see how much more this one has grown. Like on this end. Because of this tree. Yeah. They like just step down. I know it's true. Make sure you have adequate sun. I thought I trimmed enough of that tree but apparently I gotta trim way more. I do want to talk about our new chicken coop because this is something that looks so different. It's my favorite thing in the entire world. We had two coops back here. We had like a little summer one and a little winter one. And they were really run down. So he made this this year and it is my favorite thing in the world. Ashley's family history goes like back to over 200 years in North Ogden. This wood came from a barn that her family built like a hundred years ago. And so her aunt had it and said we don't have anything we're gonna do with this. I was like well can I maybe have? I incorporated it into our coop. So this barn wood came from her family's history a hundred years ago where we're at right here. So I just felt like it adds so much more to our garden because it has history behind it. And you know what? We called our last coop the Chick Chicken which is actually where wait do you have the sign still? You do have the sign still? So the Chick Chicken my grandparents had their farm. They were dairy farmers but they also had this gas station and a restaurant in the gas station that was called the Chick Chicken. Oh my gosh look at that. So I just think it's so fun. We should hang it back up. I just think it's so fun that like this barn wood has been repurposed back into like our little mini backyard barn. I just think that's so fun. Oh wow there it is. That's so cool. And like how beautiful is all that greenery in there? We have a huge vine that goes back here and so it's just so I don't know it adds so much to the coop. I feel like they're spoiled in there. Looks like a it looks like a luxury resort for chickens. Recently one of my favorite things that I've found I like to do is find old things on Facebook Marketplace for free. So I found this old barn wood that was free that matched her grandparents her great-grandparents barn wood and so everything that I've done out in the yard is like okay let's take old things and repurpose them and reuse them because if I were to buy slats of wood and try to make them look old it just it would never give it like this type of character and it cost a lot of money so I love repurposing old stuff. How cool is that all of this was completely free we just covered up our old fence. It was like more of like an orange tone so I just feel like it all matches a lot better now it's like real barn wood. I think the only thing I paid for in this garden is plants that weren't seeds already. Most of this I grew from seedlings and I started them in little starters and it went from there but so I mean the seeds were basically free from previous years but I guess the only thing I really bought was the starters that were already grown. I got to show you guys this view right now. This is my favorite time when it's like starting to get dark. Look at that mountain. We have one street above us and then it's just the straight up mountain right there. I love it. This is also Thomas has fires in here literally every single night so we will bring chairs out here have a fire and it's just so much fun. Technically the only chair I allow to stay out here. Yeah he leaves this one that he built. Look how cute. This is the only chair that gets to stay because it just fits the vibe dude. These are probably the prettiest plants that you can grow so I decided to grow these next to it just because these take very minimal water. This is cabbage so it will grow a giant ball of cabbage in the center of it. The thing that I've noticed you have to watch out for the most is it will attract spiders and bugs to the inside. The best solution for that is to have chickens. My chickens will go through and peck inside of each one of these and clear out all the bugs so I don't have to spray pesticides on all my plants because my chickens do 90% of the work anyway and if anything is left behind I just go in and scrape it up. I did tomatoes along the fence line so I didn't have to deal with putting cages around them so I'll tie them back to the fence and if they go any higher I'll just put like a stick up and tie it to the stick but tomatoes if they get to the growth height they're supposed to be they get very heavy and tip over so I decided to do them along this. They're getting plenty of Sun. These ones like half of them are actually grown from what are called suckers so I'll take the sucker is a stem that grows outside of the V so if you have a V and there's one that comes right out the center it's called a sucker so I just cut those off when they're brand new plants and I replanted them and they'll grow roots into the ground so I'm able to get twice as many tomato plants out of one tomato plant rather than having to grow a bunch from starters. Instead of buying 10 grapevines because you typically want them to cover as fast as you can if you buy one grapevine and the main stem that goes out if you stick it half of it in the ground and by half I mean like so this is the stem and you bury this center area in the ground and let it still come back out it plants a new root there and it will restart a whole new plant so you can continuously do that with the break offs and get 20 plants out of one grapevine so that's what we did here we ended up burying them and re-digging them up and moving them and so I have so many grapevines that are planted in this area that I actually don't know what I'm gonna do when they actually mature. I know they're running out of places huh? Yeah I'm gonna have to run them along that whole entire fence I'm like screws in the fence and let them grow along that but I don't know Alright well that's everything for today's video thank you guys so much for watching if you haven't already hit that red subscribe button make sure you do that and we will see you in the next video