Our Garden Spaces
Flat garden space is hard to come by here at Stone Circle Hills. With hills, dips, and a septic field near the house, we’ve had to get creative—and that’s just fine by us. Instead of one large garden, we tend three smaller vegetable plots, which makes crop rotation and soil health easier to manage anyway.
In addition to our main gardens, we’ve carved out three small plots for growing forage crops—greens for the chickens during summer, and cool-season crops to help feed two fall pigs. It doesn’t replace the feed bill entirely, but it adds variety to their diet and puts garden waste to good use.
We don’t like to leave soil bare. Bare dirt leaks life.
Between rows, we sow overcrops like sun hemp, clover, and cowpeas—staggered throughout the season. These help fix nitrogen, suppress weeds, and enrich the soil when tilled in lightly at the end.
We shallow till just 3–4 inches deep, gently building up rows. This protects soil life, minimizes nutrient loss, and encourages worms.
We use 3–4 bags of wood chips and 3–4 bales of straw annually as mulch between plantings—this keeps weeds down and the soil covered.
Most of our vegetables are started in trays, which lets us grow more in less space and stay ahead of the seasons.
We keep it clean and safe:
Earth’s Ally and Neem oil are our go-to sprays
They’re certified organic and safer than synthetic pesticides
Yes, they need more frequent applications—but it’s worth it to keep chemicals off our food and out of the soil
We garden with the land, not against it—adapting to the hills, using what space we have, and feeding the soil while we feed ourselves and our animals. It’s not flashy, but it works—and that’s what matters.