Thursday, March 31, 2011

Getting Ready to Garden

I have been gardening now for 2.5 years. Yep. I’m still a gardening newbie. I’m working my way up to eventually growing enough at one time to feed my family a salad, or to can a couple jars of green beans (I do have a family of 8!) So my garden has been more of an experiment over the last two years, but I’m learning! This year I actually took a garden planning class at our local cultural museum. My goal this year is to be able to can salsa, green beans, and homemade tomato sauce.  Oh, I thought I might experiment with making pickles too.

garden2 

This is my garden at the moment. Pretty ugly. It was so cold it snowed yesterday, so I haven’t even started doing anything to the garden. I use the Square Foot gardening method and love it! I hardly have to do any weeding, which is why I never gardened before. One box is 2’x8’ and the other is 3’x8’. The lovely tablecloth on the ground is to kill the grass. I plan on putting mulch all around the garden this year.

garden1

If you look through the fence, you can see a small plot of dirt. That is another weed patch garden. I would really like to built 3 more Square Foot garden boxes out there this year. I’m not sure it will get done though. This area gets full sun all the time. I plan to plant most of my tomatoes out there this year. I also have a couple of raspberry starts that just might produce a berry or two this year (that is if the kids didn’t dig it up!)

dirt

Pretty soon though, it will be time to add some compost and turn over the soil.

garden3

So for the time-being, we’ll see if any of our seedling survive being cared for by a toddler and preschooler (They like to move the sticks around and water the plants often.)

garden4

So far so good! 

My garden last year
Another view of my garden
My garden the first year
Easy Egg Garden (Homemade Chia-Pet)

 

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6 Comments:

Blogger The HSV said...

PERFECT! Thanks for sharing the before stages!!

March 31, 2011 at 9:36 AM  
Anonymous Katrina Kennedy said...

Oh, Mo! I Love my garden and love that you garden as well. Looking forward to seeing it grow.

March 31, 2011 at 9:54 AM  
Blogger Kelly said...

Love the sweet little hands in the dirt. ;-)
Kelly

March 31, 2011 at 12:11 PM  
Blogger Goat Gal said...

We had a dumping of the plants incident with my 2 year old! One of the risks of gardening with preschoolers I guess. I hope to square foot garden this year as well... once the snow is gone... I have to figure out how to keep the goats from eating everything though :)

March 31, 2011 at 12:21 PM  
Blogger Melissa N. said...

Love it! Thanks for sharing...hopping over from HSV!

March 31, 2011 at 1:53 PM  
Blogger Zonnah said...

I want to can my own tomato sauce this year as well. Good luck!

March 31, 2011 at 10:08 PM  

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