We are attempting out first garden this year and I hope to capture as much of the process as I can in a sort of blog journal. I am pretty new at this gardening thing and my only experience has been maintaining (a.k.a not killing) a few house plants when we were first married and growing some tomatoes, bell peppers, and potted herbs last year. We had a successful crop of cherry tomatoes last year but the peppers didn’t fair so well. The mailman kindly informed me my pots were too small to begin with and C managed to eat every pepper as soon as it started to resemble a pepper! The rest of our landscaping is a remnant from the previous owners and has managed to stay alive under our not so vigilant care.
All that said….my goals for our garden this year are to first of all have fun taking care of it, and secondly, have at least one thing grow big enough that we can eat it!! I know this year (and really all after) will be a year of learning with some successes and probably a few more failures but we are excited for this little adventure.
I ordered seeds from 
because I had a coupon. I consulted a few garden “advisors” on what is better grown by seed vs. plant and I ended up going with the following seeds: spinach, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, delicata squash, black beauty squash, swiss chard, basil, yellow carrots, and cabbage. They threw in a starter packet of beefsteak tomatoes too.
Seed packets from seedsnow.com
On April 19th, the kids helped me get the seeds started. I spent some time beforehand reading tips and advice from several online sources about the best containers and soil to use. For the containers, I ended up going with paper based egg cartons and a few peat cups my neighbor gave me. I got a bag of organic seed starter mix at Home Depot for the “soil.” We had fun filling the egg carton and cups with soil and inserting the seeds. C decided using her hands to scoop the starter mix out of the bucket was preferable to using a small scoop. We also wrote the names of the eeds we were planting on popsicle sticks and inserted these into the cups so that we wouldn’t forget what we planted. We then covered the carton and peat cups loosely with plastic wrap to keep in the moisture. We set up our little greenhouse on a plant rack we had stored in the crawl space and we have been moving the rack around to follow the sun from the back of the house in the morning to the front in the afternoon. We were thrilled to see sprouts from all but one of the seeds three days after we started them. Our brussels sprouts seem to be lagging behind. Yesterday we noticed what looks to be a tiny sprout coming so we shall see what happens.
C and I getting the seed starters ready
Our tiny “greenhouse” getting some sun
We don’t have a very big yard and we have lots of trees in the back so we decided the side of our house is the ideal spot for our little garden. It’s going to be a 4×8 raised bed. The hubby dug out our rose bush and another plant that was there and got the spot ready to build the bed. We are hoping to complete construction of the bed this weekend.
Our garden spot before building the raised bed
There is so much to learn when starting a garden and one thing I neglected to consider was the best time to plant each vegetable we ordered. I was talking to a friend at a party and she told me I should have planted some of them already since they are cool weather plants. Oops! In an effort to still get at least one of these going even though our bed isn’t ready, I planted some spinach seeds in a large pot we had herbs in last year. We haven’t gotten the soil for our garden yet so I went ahead and used some soil we had in pots last year. Definitely not the ideal soil but hopefully it will work this year!
Pot for spinach
That’s all for today. Hopefully I’ll be back in a few days with an update and picture of our constructed bed!
enspire balance 