Mystery Bed...

I hope you can follow this logic...

This year, we made a few garden beds....but they won't be ready until next year.

Yeah...no one I told got it either.

Let me go back...

We decided to make some dedicated space for berry bushes.

We dream of raspberries, blueberries and Chester blackberries.

Seriously...there is a type of blackberry that is called a Chester.

Of course we have to plant it!

Out of the way...in the sunlight...near evergreen trees...

This new planting area had to have all of these things.

Ches had cleared out sumacs from the west side of our property last year.

The area seemed perfect!

We moved railway ties.

We layered the beds with straw-like grasses, manure from a friend,

50 % composted compost...basically anything we could find to fill the beds.

I considered the fact that new plants are sensitive to the high nitrogen in fresh food waste.

Our compost isn't composted enough!

Let's wait a season, I said.

Give the area a chance to decompose and settle.  

We still had a buncha beds that were empty this year.

What to do?

Ches thought it would be a good spot to plant several packets of sunflowers we had laying around.

Not a bad idea!

I'm not a huge one for flowers.

I don't have the energy to deal with things that aren't going to feed me back.

I am branching out though...

and perhaps giant dried up sunflower heads might be a nice treat in the winter for our chickens?

We bought a selection of different sunflowers from a fundraising neighbour.

There was a wide variety of colours and sizes.

From shortest to tallest:

Teddy bear (bright orange)

Autumn Beauty (bright yellow and red)

Velvet Queen (dark crimson)

Early Russian (traditional yellow)

Giganteus (bright yellow and HUGE)

I hadn't given a lot of though to where we would plant them.

A temporary fix for an empty garden!

I figured they would do alright in these fresh beds...and even if they didn't...

we already had long term plans for these beds anyway!

What I didn't realize was that I was in for a big surprise!

The compost grew mystery plants!

We have no idea what the above vine is...kinda looks like a pumpkin plant.

We discovered 3 kinds of tomato plants growing!

Some sort of regular red tomato, romas and some type of cherry tomato!

Our sunflowers ended up doing fantastically well!

One of the plants is over 14' tall!!!

We waited patiently to see which kinds of sunflowers actually took.

We didn't cover them with mulch or anything.

We feared the chipmunks took the seeds away.

One of the railway ties we used actually had a wild black raspberry cane in it when it was moved.

It actually came back!

Do you see the strong new green cane vs the dark red dried up version?

Our patience paid off and we are now rewarded with beautiful sunflowers!

Striking...

Breath-taking...

Bold sunflowers...

These things might have been an afterthought...but they make my soul soar when I look at them.

Sometimes it is better to be surprised than plan your whole entire life...