Gardening

One of my goals for this year was to plant a garden. As a kid, I would help my dad in the garden, but haven't really done any gardening on my own since. I thought it would be a fun family activity and a great way for the boys to see where we get our food. We wanted to start small this year to see if we could get the hang of it.

We started our garden earlier this year in May. We bought some garden soil.

Then we built and filled in our 4x4 garden box and started planting.

Dallin and Connor loved digging in the dirt.

A few days later, we decided that one little 4x4 garden box was not enough for all the things we wanted to plant. So we tore it up and started over. We were able to successfully transplant all of the plants that we had already planted, even some of the "from seed" plants that had begun to sprout tiny leaves. 

We added 2 more 4x4 boxes, lots of water, sunshine and a few of months. And here is the finished product!

I'm surprised at how easy it was to grow a garden.  Every thing we planted took off and grew like crazy with very little effort on our part. There was a big start up cost, so it certainly wasn't cheaper than just buying the produce at the store, but there will be less to buy for a garden next year.

 We grew cantaloupe (below) and strawberries (not pictured) from seed. 

Dallin and Connor got little seed starter kits for Easter so they could each grow their favorite fruit. (Can you guess which fruit goes with which boy?) The strawberry plants were too small to produce anything this year, but we've gotten several cantaloupes from the garden so far. Dallin is so excited because he LOVES cantaloupe. Also in this cantaloupe/strawberry bed are some cucumber plants.

This bed has carrots (front of the picture) with green beans and snap peas behind them. We also planted lettuce here which has already run its course and been replaced with a second lettuce crop.

The third box has mostly tomatoes in it. It makes me so happy to be able to go outside and pick tomatoes for my dinner when ever I want to. I'm the only tomato eater in our house so I get them all! I'm also going to make pasta sauce and such with the tomatoes so everyone else in the family will appreciate them. Next to the tomatoes are bell peppers (which didn't produce much) and cilantro (which REALLY didn't produce much, but now we know to NOT grow that next year).

 Perhaps our favorite plant of all in the garden is the Thai basil plant.

It's a little different from traditional Italian basil. The leaves are smaller and have a slightly different taste, but it still works in cooking Italian food and makes our Thai dishes taste perfectly delicious. It grows beautiful purple flowers on it. We've been pinching the flowers back to promote more leaf growth, but I think it would make a beautiful "flower" bush in a yard.

 We gotten a lot more food from our garden than what is pictured below, but this is what was available at the moment and I want you to see what we've grown.

There are usually a lot more tomatoes ripe at once, but I had just canned a bunch of them. More about our adventures in canning in another post...