Three Generations Share One Vegetable Garden on a Winston, Georgia Family Farm, Where Young Amelia Gathers Strawberries and Her Brother Aiden Tends the Beets

The entry gate to this Winston, Georgia garden is corrugated metal, flanked by two mature sky pencil hollies, and behind it a whole family goes to work. HGTV’s Brian Patrick Flynn toured the small family farm, about 28 miles west of Atlanta, in a 23-photo slideshow published July 17, 2020, and described a vegetable garden shared by three generations.

The tour is a feature, not a news event, and it holds up as a set of ideas for a garden that children can actually use. Two of its youngest gardeners, Amelia and her brother Aiden, have jobs of their own: Amelia gathers strawberries and Aiden tends the beets.

A Gate, Two Hollies and Zones for Everyone

According to the HGTV tour, the garden was designed for the whole family to pitch in and work together. It has a community feel and is divided into zones, each with a different purpose, and the property is described as open and airy with antique and weathered elements.

Industrial metal troughs sit alongside the planter beds, sized for small hands. Wooden stake markers label the vegetables in each bed, and the slideshow says the markers give Amelia and Aiden a hands-on gardening education, since the children can see what is growing and learn the names.

The photos are credited to Flynnside Out, the production company Flynn founded, according to his HGTV profile.

Amelia’s Strawberries, Aiden’s Beets

The slideshow gives each child a task. In a caption titled “Summer Chores,” Amelia, described as one of the youngest family members, is tasked with helping to grow beds of vegetables. A later caption says she is tasked with gathering fresh strawberries from the garden for salads or desserts.

Aiden has his own bed. The caption for the beets describes a raised bed filled with beets that Aiden, Amelia’s brother, tends with the shared hose. The vegetable list in the tour includes tomatoes, banana peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, beets, bell peppers and sweet potatoes, along with strawberries and muscadine grapes.

The strawberries are fenced. A picket fence protects the strawberry bed from deer and rabbits, the tour says, a reminder that a garden meant for small hands still needs to hold up against animals that raid the crop.

The Playhouse That Became the Garden Shed

The red garden shed has a caption of its own, and it used to be a playhouse. HGTV says the family moved it from the back of the property to the front and plumbed it with a hose hookup. Skylights and windows give it a greenhouse effect, the interior is heated for winter plants, and an outdoor washing station sits beside it.

A second outbuilding, a shake-sided shed, was built from scratch. The farm also has pet goats, which the tour says roam freely and munch on tree bark and mulch, and a working blacksmith shop called Hobes Hill Forge.

Arbors for Muscadine Jam and Sunset Lunches

Two arbors anchor the garden. One was built for muscadine grapes, which the family turns into jam, and it has become a spot for lunch and for watching the sunset. A shaded arbor in the middle of the garden is used for snacks and lunches.

Muscadines suit the setting. A University of Georgia CAES Field Report article from 2001 notes that the grapes are grown on trellises and, according to UGA Extension fruit crops horticulturist Gerard Krewer, grow everywhere in Georgia except the high mountains. The article, which is dated, says the grapes ripen from early August in south Georgia, with harvest moving north into mid-fall.

Borrowing the Idea for Another Yard

Flynn is an interior designer who came to the field from television production. A profile in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes him as a self-taught Atlanta designer who worked on HGTV’s Dream Home and Urban Oasis, and later made the Mind for Design series for the Magnolia Network.

What the Winston garden shows is not a design trick. It is a division of labor. Each child has a bed or a task, the vegetables are labeled on stakes, and the troughs are sized for small hands.

University of Maryland Extension’s Frederick County Master Gardener Susie Quinlan Hill makes a similar case in a gardening-with-children article. She suggests raised beds or defined paths to protect important plants, pointing out what children can pick and smell, and giving them low-stakes jobs such as sowing old seeds. Her main message is that time spent together matters more than a finished to-do list.

Another family garden story on this site, Sharea Harris and her daughter Jane in Pine Hills, shows the same pattern in a backyard: one adult started with collards, and a child now gardens beside her.

HGTV’s gardens page files the Winston tour under vegetable gardens, next to a second feature on a garden that works for kids and parents. For readers planning a bed with children next spring, the Georgia farm offers a plain template: give each child one job, label the rows, and fence the strawberries.

Get stories like this by email. Sign up for The Parent Diaries Letter.

This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: “Kitchen garden at Los Poblanos” by PralineCoffee, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (illustrative photo, not the Winston, Georgia garden)