Zone 7 Fall Garden Tour (2025)
Welcome to my fall garden tour! Better late than never, right? I have had this sitting in a draft in my list of WordPress posts for about 2 months now 🙂 It’s been a busy holiday season. But now I’m finally getting around to converting my YouTube fall garden video tour to a blog post.
We’ll talk through what grew well into fall, what I’m experimenting with as we head into winter, and some things we’ve already got on our list for spring. So let’s get started!
Raised beds
Last fall, I replaced some of the landscaping up here with perennial herbs. I have creeping thyme on each end, and then working toward the yarrow in the center, I put in rosemary and sage. They were all propagations from elsewhere in the yard.
I love having this area be perennial herbs because they are so lovely and low maintenance for so much of the year. Plus, the strong scent is hopefully a helpful pest deterrent for some of the things I’ve got growing in the raised beds up here!
For fall, the two raised beds closest to the house (the ones with the cattle panel trellis) had sugar snap peas, lettuce, kale, green onions, and an assortment of other stuff. We didn’t get many sugar snap peas—they usually aren’t prolific in the fall. But I still try every year!
Beyond those two raised beds, I’ve got two raised beds that I am using my new Vego Greenhouse Covers on. These are made of high-quality plastic that helps insulate plants and extend the growing season. And they work beautifully!
I was able to get an extra month or so of growth out of the greens I had under there—Swiss chard, sorrel, lettuce, arugula, and spinach, mostly.
And in the final raised beds, I had an assortment of Brussels sprouts, cabbage, spinach, daikon radishes, kale, and Swiss chard. I will definitely be growing more daikon radishes next year—these things are HUGE and so tasty! Perfect for kimchi!
I also love getting a decent start on spinach because the spinach will hold through the winter. Even when it gets snowed on, it won’t die if the plants are mature enough. They will rebound beautifully when temperatures begin to rise, and you’ll have a jump start on your greens!
Moving strawberries
One of my big fall chores was moving my strawberries. They had really gotten overgrown in the asparagus patch in just one season, and I didn’t like how hard it was to get to them. So I dug up a bunch of babies and potted them up.
I passed a few along, but I planted many of them in my elevated garden bed that I had an edible tuber garden in this year. I also planted them in my Greenstalk! I’m hoping that this makes the berries easier to access and protect from critters next year.
Freezing veggies
I lost count of how many soups and sauces I made and froze. I need to get better at keeping track of that! We have a deep freezer filled to the brim with soups. I also processed and froze a decent amount of Swiss chard, kale, and Roma tomatoes.
We also dug up enough sunchokes to make a REALLY tasty sunchoke soup. It’s essentially just a creamy potato soup made with sunchokes instead of potatoes. Yummy!
As for shelf-stable stuff we have for this winter, we have a TON of sweet potatoes and butternut squash ready to eat, too. We’ve been pulling these as we want to use them for dinners, and it’s so nice that they are shelf stable and don’t take up room in the freezer.
Things we dehydrated
I also got a dehydrator on Facebook marketplace this summer and dehydrated a ton of herbs. I made a bunch of spice mixes with hot peppers, too. They are so much more potent than many of the ones you buy in stores, so a little goes a long way. I just snipped the stems off, dehydrated them, and ran them through a food processor.
And I processed a bunch of roselles from my Hibiscus Sabdariffa plant. These are super easy to snip off, wash, and dehydrate for teas and whatnot. I love their tart taste, and the leaves on the plant are edible, too.
Expanding the pond
My husband decided he wanted to expand the pond. Yes, the pond we just put in last year. I was all for it, but I didn’t think he was going to jump into it this fall. Well, I came home one day, and he had dug out this whole area and moved on to digging out the pond.
The new pond is over twice the size of the old one, and it uses a soft shell liner instead of a smaller hard liner. So it looks much more natural and will hopefully be more welcoming to critters!
We reused all of the rocks from the previous pond and got some giant flagstone pavers from my mom’s friend for free. We busted those up with a hammer to put around the pond, and it worked perfectly. I might add some more rocks next spring when we landscape around it, but we’ll see.
Removing the grasses
We committed to removing three of our six miscanthus grasses this year. I’d wanted to wait until next spring to remove the last three big ones up here by the patio. But when Mike started digging up this area for the pond, we decided to knock out the grasses this fall.
Digging them up actually wasn’t as big of a pain as I thought it would be. But disposing of them was a huge pain. They are serrated, so you have to be careful when handling them. And they were hard to cut down and stuff in yard waste bags. Good riddance!
In their place, I planted a self-fertile hardy kiwi vine that we’ll build a large trellis for next. And two goumi berry bushes, which I am super excited about! I need to do a post about why I chose those. The foliage is gorgeous.
The berry patch
Hopefully our berry patch will really be getting into the swing of things next year! We have red raspberries and golden raspberries back here, as well as three varieties of gooseberries and tons of blueberries. We put in five more blueberry bushes I got on an end-of-season clearance sale at Lowe’s, too!
While the blueberries should be a couple more years, we will get raspberries next year. The birds really went to town on them this year, so I need to think through what type of deterrent I want to use next year. Looking forward to expanding the mulching here and cleaning things up in the spring!
Eventually, the two mulched areas back here will meet, and there won’t be any grass. Just wood chips and paver paths. And probably lots of bindweed, but that’s a problem for a different day…
Cut flowers
We made some beautiful cut flower arrangements well into the fall, too. I have a post about late-blooming native plants to add to your garden, but I also like using other things like dried seed heads, parsley sprigs, and Swiss chard in fall arrangements.
Front yard
And last up, we have the front yard! Converting this grass to productive gardens was our big project last spring, and we’ve loved having the additional growing space. I’ve been slowly planting more native plants, berry bushes, and other perennials up here as I buy them.
We have three currant bushes up here right now—two black and one red—as well as a pink one coming this spring! And lots of blackberry and black raspberry plants up here in the front yard, too. It gets great light, and we don’t want to waste it!
That about wraps up my fall garden tour. I’ll probably do a winter garden tour at some point in January, and the countdown to spring has already started in my head! 🙂
