Garden Week

The first week in February, we realized we were late getting our garden started. We decided to do a hand's-on week of school--Garden Week. Of course, this will go on for longer than a week! But we needed a good focused week to get started on this project, or it would never go. A lot of things in life are like that.

We started out marking the garden--not as easy as it might seem. We wanted to be sure it looked right in the years to come, so we worked to be sure the garden is parallel to the house. Katie and Owen were instrumental in the process and we did several contortions with tape measures, speed squares and things we made up to look like surveying equipment. In the end, we were pleased with the result.

Owen did the bulk of the post hole digging--not a terrible job in sandy soil, but we had to go deeper for more support. Once he got one hole dug. My Momma's helper team and I filled in the holes and tamped down the dirt.

Happy helper!

(note: the tractors are not ours. they belong to our friend Joey, who sold us the land, cleared the land, framed up our house....we would not be where we are without him! Thanks, Joey!)

After some good physical effort and a few days, the garden is taking shape. You can see the fence is up, and the back raised bed is in. The little bed in front of it is an intensively planted bed of onions--some plants and some sets. Sweets, yellows and reds.

The digging to the left of the onion bed is the beginning of preparing the potato area. We found a HUGE root which we alternately burned and dug out.

So far we have spinach, leaf lettuce, cabbage plants, broccoli plants,
pea plants and seeds and a bed of mesculun mix....mmmmm!
As time allows, I could really go hog-wild on posting photos. I finally discoverd how to compress the photo files and they actually upload in a reasonable amount of time now. But I don't know if they download faster.

We went to a hog killing a week ago. Want to see photos!?! We learned a lot and hope to raise our own to do next year. Last night, we had an incredble storm and are grateful to see how the Lord used that to BLESS our garden! The pea seeds and mesculun are popping up like crazy this morning. The air seems really clean too!

Thanks for checking up on us... we'd love to hear what you're up to!

Love, Stephanie