Garden 2009 begins

Yippee! What a fun time of the year! Planting a garden!!!!!!! Dreams are wild, visions of fresh veggies dance in my head! I thinking longingly of dirt under my fingernails and the smell of spring and summer! Today was that day. The start of the garden. I even got a gardening unit study off of homeschool freebie of the day that we're going to look at!

This year we tried something different, knowing a few more things than last year. Like how much like concrete the soil is here, really! How much deer and goats simply adore fresh green young plants. How frustrating it is to spend time building a gardening spot and planting and weeding only to get a little harvest before something comes by in the night to the Dagerath buffet. So this year, it's container gardening for us. We already had the containers. There are lots of sizable pots here that used to house live plants until....well, until we moved in! I can tell myself it's because we've been through one of the driest years on record, but we all know the truth! I never think to water plants! Which is why our aloe vera is doing so fabulously! :-)

We moved all the pots we could find to a spot by the house and it's "fenced" off by a section of fence that we used to keep around the chicken pen before they were all "free range" (or free game, as the case may be....may they all rest in peace). So, now all we have to do is fill them even more with soil. I'm thrilled to have discovered that in the woods not far from our house is lots of lots of beautiful soil. Composted by God himself. Lots of leaves and dead tree branches, etc. have made the soil dark and rich. I'm going to put the boys on the task of loading some in a wagon to top off the pots.

Now the last task to do is pick the crop. We're thinking green beas, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, maybe cantelope, lettuce and OF COURSE cilantro and jalapenos! Any other recommendations???

Here's all my men moving pots.

And this will be my garden spot for the year.

GROW, GROW, GROW!!!