The zinnias and beans look great above your stone wall. Very nice! I really like your front yard with its trees, lawn, and flowers, and your porch looks like a comfortable shady place to relax.

ThinMan

Well you know already how much I love your bean arch :) What is that drift of pink on the left of the second picture?

Annette

Annette, the drift of pink (and there's more behind the sunflowers) is way too many phlox. I dug up so many clumps this spring, but you'd never know it to look at what bloomed. There are several shades among the pink, plus some white (David). That bed really is crowded with phlox, but it's easy to forgive that when they bloom.

Thanks, Thinman! Yes, the porch is where I gravitate to with a magazine or book. The Winesap apple tree is too close to the house, but like the phlox, when it bears apples I can forget that. Unfortunately, this year we don't have a single apple on any of our many trees. They were all taken by a freeze in June. The same thing happened last year. Hard to believe it could happen two years in a row. We miss our apples!

I think your 'cottage garden' look is lovely. The grass pathway up to the house looks very welcoming. I love the large patch of phlox.

Alisande- You have a beautiful garden. I love the way you mixed in the flowers with the vegetables. I like the different heights of the sunflowers, too.

Do you have any pictures of your bean arch, before you planted the beans? I have some cattle panels and I'm trying to decide how to use them in the garden. What a nice son, to help you build such a great feature for your garden :)

Thanks, Bev and LL. Yes, I'm proud of my son, and grateful for all the work he does around here. He lives four miles away, and is a huge help to me. And he just got married last month!

Here are a couple of pictures of the bean arch. I got the idea from an old message thread on the Vertical Gardening Forum. The thread just keeps going and going.

Interestingly, although the Kentucky Wonders (on the right) dramatically outpaced the Fortex (on the left) in the second picture, Fortex produced beans much earlier than KW.

{{gwi:95909}}

When I thinned the beans, I planted the leftovers in this container and placed it next to one of my son's ham radio towers.

Alisande- Thanks for the picture. The cattle panel arch looks great and give me a good idea of how to use some in my garden :)

I love your house and its setting! I think I may have mentioned this before. It is the house I have always dreamed of, but, alas, couldn't find when we moved to the country many years ago.

I always grow my pole beans on a cattle panel arch, that I call the hoophouse. I made it about 6 feet wide, just tall enough to walk under. I used three panels. Plant beans on both sides. I pick my crop in the cool shade standing upright! Beats the heck out of stooping down a row.

Gldno1, I wish I'd made mine a little wider to bring down the height a bit. Some of the beans are caught in the tangle of vines at the top, just out of reach. Plus I forgot that when I look up, I get dizzy. I'll have to bring a little step stool out to the beans--and hang on for dear life. :-)

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