Michele's Hearth and Home: Klamath Sustainable Community Garden Tour

I was excited to read in the paper a couple of weeks ago that the Klamath Sustainable Community was actively looking for people who would like to be on the Garden Tour this year. I've never felt as if our garden looked "good enough" for a tour in the past. Although we do still have many garden projects, I thought I'd give it a try this year.
Dwight Long, the coordinator, came over for an inspection and approved our yard. They are not just looking for beautiful landscaping, but ideas for a sustainable community.
The tour was yesterday.

We just completed a drip system for the vegetable garden/chicken garden, and it has been working beautifully. It's a very efficient system, so added to the rainbarrels we are hoping to reduce our water usage in the summer.

The people were very impressed with our use of space for growing vegetables and herbs. They loved the cages for the string beans and tomatoes! It didn't hurt that everything is producing like gangbusters right now! About half the corn stalks have a couple of ears, the tomato plants are bursting with tons of beautiful green tomatoes, and the Swiss Chard and Tuscan Kale, well you can see from the photo that they are giving us lots of delicious greens!

Of course, the girls all added their own special flair...

And Kevin worked his gardening magic to make the front of the house the envy of the neighborhood!

Everyone was delighted with the lavender sugar I made for the iced tea, and the homemade zucchini chocolate muffins were also a big hit! I had a little display of things you can do with the bounty from the garden, as well as posters all around the yard pointing out the sustainable practices we use- from mulching the grass clippings, to our two composting barrels ( one is for only 'hot' chicken litter) to rain barrels and raising chickens for eggs.
It was a really fun afternoon, in spite of the hot and humid day.
Later that evening, we had a huge thunderstorm and enough rain to fill all 3 nearly empty rainbarrels. We had a lot of fun sitting on the porch, watching the light show and cooling down after such a muggy afternoon...but some of our neighbors were not so fortunate...