Vermeulen Acres

Vermeulen Acres Welcome friend, I’m glad you’re here❤️

Homesteading family in Zone 5b & garden mentor with several years hands on experience starting seeds, gardening, and putting up our harvest through canning/freezing/dehydrating.

07/06/2026

Garden in July❤️
An honest garden tour! I try not to w**d, prune, clean up before videos because it’s just not always how it is. Sometimes it looks amazing, other times it needs some attention and has to wait its turn in between motherhood, working indoors and just life.

06/30/2026

Beans!

06/29/2026

Hello heat wave!

Make sure you're keeping hydrated and taking frequent breaks! You may notice your plants looking more wilty, which is pretty normal in the heat of the day.

However, if they still look sad by evening, give them a good long drink! Watering deeply at the base of your plants will encourage those roots to follow the water down and have access to moisture and more nutrients for a healthier, more drought resistant plant!

The opposite is also true! If you do small but frequent watering, those roots are going to spend more time at the surface and ultimately not handle quite as well. My rule of thumb is typically offering a low and slow watering for a couple hours once a week, and in the height of heat, maybe another watering just to help them if they look stressed.

Raised beds or pots will need watered more often than in ground, but either way, some quality mulching can help your soil not to dry out too fast.

Timing for watering matters too! Aim for early morning, or evening! If you can water at the base of the plants, avoiding splashing soil up on the foliage, you are way less likely to have problems with diseases such as blight.

Already fighting blight/powdery mildew? (especially if you've been in these heavy rain areas), consider pruning for airflow, treating with say copper fungicide, and any diseased plants/foliage shouldn't be put into your compost pile. If after treatment with a fungicide, and pruning, the entire plant is still struggling, you may want to consider taking it out and tossing it into the trash to avoid spreading more disease to the rest of the garden.

Make sure you are sanitizing your tools in between plants too when dealing with disease/spores. That will help reduce spread of disease. Blight spores can easily transfer plant to plant, and live in the soil for several years! Take action early on, and it'll pay off in the long run. Better to lose 1-2 tomato plants than say all 30 pending how many are planted.

Happy Gardening friends!

06/25/2026

Herbs! Drying them to be shelf stable is beyond easy and a great option if you’re in abundance! A couple plants can easily produce a year’s worth for you. Happy growing friends!

Beans are in full swing here at Vermeulen Acres! We’re still working through drying herbs for the years’ use, and friend...
06/23/2026

Beans are in full swing here at Vermeulen Acres! We’re still working through drying herbs for the years’ use, and friends, do not sleep on those broccoli side shoots. After the main head is harvested, you can leave the plants and they’ll produce side shoots that do add up to a decent amount!

We have had the coolest spring and early summer than we have had for awhile so our cool crops are still popping off lovely. In turn, you may see slowed growth on those heat loving crops like cukes, corn, summer flowers, etc.

While flowers can seem frivolous when garden space if precious, I’d still encourage you to pop some color in for the pollinators and beauty of it. Gardening shouldn’t just be a chore. Grow things you love to grow! For us, snapdragons, zinnias, roses, dahlias, and sunflowers always make the cut. While more work to start some of it, I never tire of fresh cut flowers or the beauty in the garden watching the bees visit the cut flowers, veggies, and native flowers here as well.

Alternatively, there are a lot of others that can be direct sown that are super easy. Let herbs like basil go to flower, consider things like calendula, alyssum, hyssop, nasturtium, etc for low care. Many of these things you can seed save from too, very easily and it’ll save you $ in the long run. Interplanting is very beneficial if you find you’re short on pollinators in your area, while potentially serving as defense against precious crops.

For example, we interplant herbs and flowers in between our broccoli, tomato’s, peppers, etc etc. It shakes up the typical rows, more can be planted densely, and while say 10 plants or more of basil might not all get used fresh, they’re easy to save seed from, leaves dehydrated, and still serve many beneficial purposes. Get creative and have fun with it! Even tuck your onions around between things too!

Happy Gardening Y’all! ❤️

It’s that time of year again, Japanese beetle season. We typically scoot around with cups of soapy water and boop them i...
06/20/2026

It’s that time of year again, Japanese beetle season.

We typically scoot around with cups of soapy water and boop them in. Is it ideal? Not overly. But we also don’t want to hang pheromone traps to draw more in either. We’ve had success when it’s hot out by leaving open citronella candles in the sun (they tend to prefer the citronella and therefor less to hand pick off flowers, asparagus, grapes, etc.).

A person certainly could treat the lawn with beneficial nematodes, but with how far these beetles travel and how pricey the nematodes are, that’s not a practical option, especially for acreage owners. Milky spore is another thought but not something we have personally tried.

Typically between hand picking and the candles, we see a decent fall in numbers, and typically my roses and dahlias get a break from holes and organza bags.

Neem oil can be of use but needs reapplied after each rain, which would be a lot of neem oil for how much it’s been raining.

So, cups with soapy water and citronella candles it is. 🤣

06/16/2026

Very pleased with our first garlic experiment and will shoot for the moon this fall. 😍

While storms have been wild in the Midwest, I’m thankful we brought in as many flowers as we did before the hail damaged...
06/14/2026

While storms have been wild in the Midwest, I’m thankful we brought in as many flowers as we did before the hail damaged as much as it did in our garden. It’s been such a joy to share flowers with others!

Several hours have already been put in cleaning up the plant debris, pruning off any dead plants or foliage on said plants, and being very intentional with covering my raised dahlia beds trying to save the tubers from rot.

It’s been quite the wild ride already between weather and pests.

After everything is cleaned up, we’ll replant what we can with the mindset of our first frost date, which is projected for October 9 this year for those local.

Anyone else planting from seed, you’ll want to make sure to count the calendar data backwards and make sure days to maturity and germination fall before that last frost date if it’s a tender crop.

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Oskaloosa, IA

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