Planting Our First Garden!

We had a great family day today -- we really took advantage of the great weather and we finally had the chance to finish our garden! We spent the majority of the day outside -- the kids played in the yard, my husband started prepping for the pool people to come and open the pool in the next two days, and we planted our first garden! As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we built a wall of garden bricks with the intention of planting our first vegetable garden.

Today, all four of us got in on the fun and we did our interpretation of a "lasagna garden." (Sorry, I would add a link, but I'm having a hard time searching right now! Tons of info on the internet, if you are interested!) From what I've read and heard about lasagna gardening, it's a layering process and the great thing for us is that you don't have to take time digging up the grass before planting! We started by laying a layer of newspaper over the grass in our garden. Then we soaked that with water -- by next year, that grass will be totally gone, along with the newspaper -- so easy! Then we took 2 wheelbarrows full of leaves, leftover under a tree from the fall. We laid that on top of the wet newspaper. Then came a layer of peat moss, and finally a layer of top soil.

We had to take a trip to the local garden store to pick up the peat moss and the top soil and while we were there we purchased vegetable and fruit plants -- my girls were SO excited!

We may have gotten a LITTLE carried away... It didn't look like a lot of plants in our little wagon, but later when I was talking to my grandmother (garden clubber extraordinaire!) I thought, "Wow, that sounds like a lot -- that's not all going to work in there!" But, she didn't seem concerned, and I told her that this is our first garden, we'll find out what works and what doesn't work and we'll make adjustments next year! This year is a gardening adventure!

For our first garden, we chose things that we would normally eat and therefore buy at the store -- tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, bell peppers. My girls also chose a few things that they just thought would be fun to plant -- watermelon (I know... but it's an adventure!), strawberries and even pumpkin! It will be a wonderful experience for the girls to see the fruits and vegetables (hopefully!) grow and it might even get them to try some things that they may not normally eat (I've got my fingers crossed that my 9-year-old will try a tomato!). But, in any case, we had a wonderful day together as a family!