PDX Garden Home

Tucked into the west wall corner are three lavenders in pots that I keep cut back through the year. Once they stem out and flower, this whole spot smells wonderful and pulls in pollinators all season. Easy, fragrant, and the bees love it.

Meet hardy jasmine - a Portland favorite for good reason. It smells absolutely incredible (I can catch it wafting over from the neighbors on a warm day), and it can be trained to climb high, so it doubles as a fragrant privacy screen. If you want scent plus coverage, this one earns its spot.

It's called a tea olive... but it's neither tea nor olive. (Botanically, it's Osmanthus.) I planted this one in a pot a year and a half ago and it's taken off - growing so vigorously I think it's finally earned a permanent spot in the ground. A tough, handsome shrub with serious privacy-screen potential.

Plot twist: I didn't plant most of these carnations this year - they came back on their own! Turns out they're behaving as perennials for me. Tons of lush foliage, and while I only get a few blooms at a time, they keep coming and going all season long. A low-effort win in the container beds.

Creating Privacy in a Small Portland Garden

Join me for my first full garden tour of the driveway garden here in Portland, Oregon.

This is a long, slow walk through the entire June garden — from the west path and container wall, through the tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, herbs, brassicas, peas, flowers, and overwintered surprises, all the way around to the cherry tree garden and the potting bench.

This is a small garden, but it’s packed with experiments: raspberries in decorated ice cream buckets, overwintered straw flowers, flowering arugula, old leeks becoming decorative alliums, potatoes in a whiskey barrel, tomatoes in containers, sunflowers and squash waiting in the holding zone, and a whole lot of plants still looking for their final homes.

I also share some of the bigger projects behind the garden — creating privacy, building out the terraced east side, recycling bricks from my old greenhouse, and turning a formerly unused side yard into a covered potting bench area where I can work even when it rains.

This is early June in the Pacific Northwest garden: lush, messy, full of promise, slightly overplanted, and still very much in progress.

Thanks for joining me in the garden.

I’ve heard that fennel may be allelopathic, meaning it can potentially affect the growth of nearby plants. But as with a lot of gardening advice, I wonder how much the scale of the issue matters. Even if fennel does have that effect, is it really a practical concern in a small home garden bed, or is it one of those things that gets overstated? I’m curious what other gardeners have seen.

I do like the idea of cutting plants at ground level and leaving the roots in the soil when it makes sense. But in a small garden bed, space is always part of the decision. This fennel had a big root system, and I needed that space clear for the next planting, so the whole thing came out.

One of the nice things about harvesting from a home garden is that I do not have to keep every leaf. I can choose the best chard for myself, my family, or whoever I’m giving it to, and the rest can go right back into the compost. No guilt — that is just part of how the garden works.

I harvest chard by cutting individual leaves rather than taking the whole plant, leaving the smaller leaves behind so they can keep growing. I’m not too precious about keeping colors or plants separate — I just mix and match enough good leaves to make a bundle. And if there’s a little leaf miner damage near the edge, I’ll usually just trim that part off and keep the rest.