We finally began our garden this year. It was a long cold winter, so the weather is just now really cooperating, but we did a little bit last month. Lorna bought us some Tulips when we went to the festival, so we planted them in the upper garden. The boys are having a blast helping dig and turn the soil. Morgan even enjoyed helping Mommy do all the weeding in the upper bed. We will see how it improves as the summer goes on.
Due to all the new changes going on, the garden was a bit neglected this year. We got off to a good start and we still got a ton of veggies, but we didn’t do any updates beyond adding some more compost. With Darrell’s new job, we have decided that the plan for next year is to put in drip irrigation as watering the garden fell to the bottom of our to-do list.
So we spent a good chunk of time working on the garden this year. Darrell spent time pulling out the dirt to put down wire to hopefully help keep the rodents out. Then he added another board to the side to raise the beds and added a bunch of compost to make them a lot richer for the vegetables. Darrell had a lot of fun doing the garden and we got a lot of vegetables from it this year. It was fabulous. We loved it and Edward loved being able to go out back and just grab some veggies when he wanted.
Our garden has been taking off. It has grown big and bushy over the last few months. For a little while, we only thought we were going to get basil, but now everything is starting to produce. We have gotten a few zucchini, some peas, some wax beans, some cherry tomatoes, and some broccoli (though not much). The early girl tomatoes are growing and we see at least 40 of them, but as of yet, they are all still green. The carrots are looking nice and green on top, but they aren’t quite ready to pull. The regular cucumbers just started to produce so we should have some of those soon. The lemon cucumbers haven’t produced yet, but they are flowering. All in all though, it is looking good. We know a good portion of why some of the items haven’t grown is because we have been having week long heat waves of upper 80’s to low 90’s. Once it starts to cool a little more, we might get some more stuff.
Edward’s new favorite thing to do is to water the garden. He is always trying to help in any way he can if he gets to hold the hose.
And he loves to eat the veggies straight from the garden. If we can’t see him, chances are he went down to the garden and got some tomatoes. Which is evidenced by his mouth full of tomatoes when he comes back.
He also loves to pick things from the garden. He helped Darrell pick the first batch of Basil.
Darrell and I worked hard this year to get a garden set up at our place. We didn’t move in until May last year and by the time we got finished moving in and everything, it was to late to start the project of making garden beds and getting a garden planted. So we started early this year. I worked on cleaning up the garden bed that sits next to the driveway while Darrell worked on making three beds in the backyard. It was a lot of work and we spent a chunk of time working on it, but it was definitely worth it.
Here are our beginning photos:
And then we have our working on them and finished beds photos:
After we finished getting the beds ready in April, we decided to try to plant by seeds and see how they would work:
After waiting a month, we started seeing green sprouts, but then the birds started eating the poor little seedlings. So in the end, we ended up just buying plants and replanting everything.
