Starting a Garden - Step One, Move the Bricks!

Yesterday was a beautiful day here and we had the great fortune of having all four us home to enjoy it! We spent the afternoon outside in our yard -- the girls enjoying their new swing set, and my husband and I taking the first steps to have our first garden! One of the elements that I wanted to have for the kids in our "Best Backyard on the Block" quest is a little garden in which they can help to grow vegetables. I think this will be beneficial for all of us -- the girls will learn about what goes into getting the food that is put on the table, they will have a great time getting to tend their own little garden, and maybe it will even encourage them to try some other veggies that they may not be interested in right now. Not to mention the benefit of going out to the garden to pick some veggies, as opposed to driving to the store!

And as a special bonus, creating the garden is helping with another ongoing project this spring -- to clean up the yard! Near the site of the new garden, we had a sandbox that the girls have not used in years, and we cleaned that out and will be putting it on the curb this week. We also are FINALLY using the pallet of garden bricks that Grandpa and Gramby bought me (at my suggestion) for my birthday, hmmm... 11 years ago? I have gardening/landscaping commitment issues -- I'm finally starting to learn that you can do something in your yard and if you change your mind -- you can re-do it! Anyway, that birthday present came when we were living in our first house (before this current one). I had a vision, at that time, of a landscape project that I wanted to do at that house. I also had a vision, that we would be at that house a lot longer than we were! Shortly after we had our first daughter, we started re-evaluating that house -- we loved it, but it was only a two bedroom, with a small yard, near a busy street, and not in a great school district. When we started thinking about moving to another home, I decided that I wanted to save the bricks and take them with us. Much to the delight of my husband! He's such a great, PATIENT guy -- it was the LAST day that we had at the house and our last chance to take anything from the house or yard -- it was a super long day, and it was November, I believe... My sweetie went back to the house for the bricks, at the end of a long day of moving. It was dark out, it was cold, and he loaded up his Subaru wagon with as many of the bricks as he could pry out of the ground! (Love that man!) Of course, then they came to this house and were piled up into a corner of the yard for the past 8 years until I was able to come up with a use for them! :) (That is a picture of where the bricks have been sitting all these years, and of the girls checking out all of the bugs and worms in the ground underneath them!)

So yesterday, he and I piled them up in the girls' wagon and wheeled that back and forth over to the garden site. We ended up having enough bricks to put on the other side of the little picket fence -- we built a similar wall around our irises that are sprouting up! That fence separates our pool from what we call the girls' yard -- our side yard that is completely fenced off from the street, neighbor's yard, and pool. This is where we have their swing set, where the veggie garden will be, and the area that we are working on this spring in our best backyard project! This week, my garden guru, Christine (who I think was hoping to sneak over this summer and smuggle the bricks out of the yard...;) is coming over to check out what we've done and to give me some tips on planting the garden -- so stay tuned!