The Hershberger Garden, The Beauty Of Flowers, Food And More!

Today marks the first ever Showcase Garden Article for This Is My Garden! We have had quite  a few people send in their gardens over the last week, and we are excited to finally start showing the gardens of the world!

WOW, do we have a good one to start off with!

Brittany and Jonathan Hershberger hail from Northeast, Ohio, and live in the beautiful village of Sugarcreek, Ohio.

Their town is smack in the middle of Amish country, and is also known as the little Switzerland of Ohio.

The Hershberger’s garden rivals the natural beauty of the surrounding area, with raised rows, raised beds, flowers, and a growing selection of perennial crops.

As you will see from Brittany’s description below, beyond its natural beauty, it produces a lot of great food for their family!

It’s always so impressive to see a garden that provides for the family. There is nothing better than being able to know what goes into your food on your family’s table.

Of course, the best way to do that is to simply grow it! And that is just what the Hershberger’s do.

Be sure to check at the conclusion of the article to see how you can submit your own garden to be one of our Wednesday This Is My Garden Features!

As we will do each week, we will include additional full-size photos of the Featured Garden at the end of the article.

So let’s take a look at the garden of Brittany and Jonathan Hershberger!

The Hershberger Garden

Location : Sugarcreek, Ohio

Growing Zone : USDA Zone 6

From Brittany Hershberger:

Before we ever built our raised garden boxes and made the garden raised rows with the mulch walkways, we had just a big dirt garden that I planted.

The weeds were terrible, and it would take Jon and I a whole day to weed everything. I simply couldn’t keep it under control myself. Things would grow, but not very well.

We decided we needed to do something, so we put straw down and covered in black plastic over winter. In the Spring, we took the plastic off and mounded new rows of top soil mixed with compost over the straw.

We finished by mulching all of the walk ways. It’s so much easier to maintain, and I can walk through the garden and raised beds in about a half hour everyday to keep weeds down. Best of all, our plants grow great!

This past year, we had quite a spread in our garden. We had cherry and roma tomatoes, and several other slicing and canning type tomatoes, red beets, radishes, sugar snap peas, onions, popcorn, zucchini, yellow squash, spaghetti squash, pumpkins, watermelon and musk melon.

We grew 9 types of peppers – sweet bell, cubanelle, sweet banana, hot hungarian wax, cayenne, chili, jalapeno, pablano and the Chinese 5 color.

All of that was in our regular garden. In our raised beds we had brussel sprouts, cabbage, lettuce, pickles, garlic, carrots, green beans, black beans and strawberries.

We currently have about 7 or 8 blackberry bushes and have plans of putting in some blueberry bushes, some grapes and a few fruit trees as well.

We of course did a lot of fresh eating from the garden, but I also can and freeze many of the items also. I canned tomato sauce, beans, carrots, pickles, ketchup, salsa, candied jalapeno and numerous other items.

We did use some of the blackberries to try out making our own homemade wine as well.

As far as flowers go, most of my flower beds are filled with perennials. Some of my favorites that I have are lavender, hardy geraniums, hosta, black-eyed susan, rose bushes, and cactus.

I plant a lot of marigolds around the raised garden beds. I also have herbs around in various places as well for me to use in the kitchen and also I cut some fresh to feed to our chickens as well.

I have attached some pictures of our gardens, we have a large garden that we did rows and mulched in between and we also have raised beds.

Of course Jon got most of his ideas from what he saw at your farm. I also put one of my flower gardens in there.

We are so excited for the up coming growing season. We got our gardens how we wanted this past season and now we are hoping to get grapes, blueberries and some fruit trees going this coming season.

Share Your Garden With TIMG!

Thank you so much Brittany for sharing your garden with us!

And now it’s your turn to share your garden! We want to showcase gardens of all shapes, sizes and types from all around the world. It will make this site a great site for gardeners to dream, learn and share!

If you would like to have your garden be on one of our Wednesday Garden Showcases, go to the share my garden tab on the website and fill it out. If it’s easier – you can even email us your garden story and pictures at info@thisismygarden.com.