Holy crap, it actually works!

It happened!  It happened!  Sprouts are starting to...sprout!  Whew.  I was skeptical, I'll admit.  (Although, the fabulous quality of the soil has been apparent from the beginning, which did make all this seem slightly more likely...)  Fiona and my parents spotted the first onion shoots on the daily checking-of-the-garden sojourn a few days ago, and this morning she and I saw some tiny green peekers in the bean foot.  Oh joy, there shall be bounty...

Future Salads and Salsa

As May neared, the pressure to get the seeds and seedlings in the ground mounted.  One chilly Wednesday morning right after breakfast, my daughter, Fiona, and I headed outside to get it done.  We had already strategized what seeds would go where, and squarefootgardening.org had helped me decipher how many of each type of seed to plant.  I should pause to say that the website, while it has just enough information, isn't really meant to be definitive.  You're really supposed to...well, buy the book.  Guess if I'm going to?

So, back to those seeds.  Our choices were based partly on the vegetables and herbs my mom and I are most likely to use in cooking, partly on what there was room for, and partly on what struck Fiona as fun when we were standing in front of the seed packets.  In seed form we ended up with:

• Radishes
• Mesclun greens
• Green lettuce
• Peas (bush)
• Cucumbers
• Carrots
• Onions (they were actually tiny onions, not seeds)

In seedling form we have:

• Tomatoes
• Basil
• Thyme
• Jalapenos
• Parsley

All this is fitting in a 4X4 foot garden plot, mind you- crazy, right??  I have no idea what volume we'll end up with, but either way, I foresee yearly footage added on to what we have now, so we can adjust accordingly.

  

Meanwhile, on that damp morning, Fiona and I used screws and twine to mark off the square foot sections of the plot.  The seedlings went right in, then I used my finger to poke the appropriate holes for the seeds.  For instance, you plant 16 cucumber seeds per square foot, so I just eyeballed it and made 4 rows of 4 finger holes, dropping a seed in each one.  Fiona patted down the dirt.  Voila, garden!  

Why, Virginia, your child has no face!

And now... the waiting....

Why I Finally Got Around To It

Monday, April 15^th, 2013: This weekend I regularly used the term “coarse vermiculite”.  Don’t I sound capable and smart?  Aren’t you jealous of my fancy word use?  Do you even care what coarse vermiculate is? (The answer to all these, I’m thinking, is “no”).  Well, in case you maybe care a little bit, here’s what’s happening: we are planting a vegetable garden.   For years, this has seemed like something I should so totally be doing.  Me and the Growing of Food in One’s Own Yard are a match made in heaven.  Healthy eating is a way of life for my family (with our fair share of chocolate and beer sprinkled in), I’m on a tight budget so the farmer’s market- while wonderful- is sometimes too much for my wallet to handle, and I’m known by friends and acquaintances as something of a hippie who makes her own cleaning supplies, cloth diapered her kid, and goes through phases where she makes all her bread from scratch.  So why have I waited this long?  The short answer is: I’m lazy.  The longer one has to do with being very intimidated by trying to grow anything, worrying about the initial costs, being a working mother who barely has time for the living things she’s already responsible for, and…um, laziness.  But this year, a few stars aligned to make it seem like it’s really a good time.  We moved into a new house last fall, and it has a perfect flat, sunny area in the backyard.  My mother, who has grown many a vegetable garden but can’t do it currently because the deer eat everything in her yard, offered to back the project financially in exchange for a share of the bounty.  And, finally, my daughter is 5 and ½, which seems like the perfect age for truly reaping the benefits of being involved in a gardening project.  Thus, the coarse vermiculite. 

We're going to do Square-Foot Gardening, which is all the rage, and seems like a good place to start for a novice.  I won't get into a lot of detail on the exact theory and all that, but you can check it out at squarefootgardening.org

For our first step we:

• Put together the wooden border
• Laid down a weed barrier material 
• Mixed and spread the soil

Next, planning out the plot and getting those seeds and seedlings in the ground.

Fiona nailed the decorative tops on by herself

Fiona and her Nana set weed barrier material

Lee, my mom, and Fiona: mix, mix, mix