Gardening in the Backyard

I have greatly enjoyed the gardening this year. I love being outdoors, I love having the children outdoors, and even better is the fresh food. We started with a fairly small garden area this year, I crammed in basil, stevia, chives, cilantro, parsley, 7 zucchini plants, 4 tomatoes plants, and several cucumber plants. See Garden Area #1 picture below. (also you can see our new compost area built out of old pallets right past the garden)

Garden Area #1

But I ran out of room. So we had to expand. So we started with just a small area next to the pool. This is where I planted 9 squash plants and watermelon. You will see these below. But once again we weren't happy and wanted to plant more. After all, we have great weather for near year-round gardening. So we expanded below again. This was last Tuesday that we cleared off the rest of this, tilled and planted more. This time we planted seeds. Which honestly scared me to death. I like to have little plants to start with, it is much easier. With seeds I just throw them in the ground and pray that they come to life.

Garden area #2

And the seeds started to grow. Six days after planting green bean seeds, they were looking lovely. The fresh row was a beautiful sight.

Green beans (6 days after planting)

But not all the seeds have sprouted yet ... Its been about 12 days, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. We are still waiting on a lot of corn, carrots, and cantaloupe to sprout. And the sunflower seeds I planted next to the fence I am thinking may have been stolen by the squirrels.

But we have several watermelon growing now also.

Watermelon

And while we work in the garden (which we don't nearly enough) ... the children get to spend time playing outside. Here is Jasper in front of the zucchini plants.


And Petra spent some time playing with the water hose.


And today we had more fresh veggies. I picked this right after lunch to freeze for later. If it is too mushy for food, there is always puree that I hide in some foods, baby puree, and stew that we can use it for. (yes, I obviously forgot about the zucchini on the far right)


And then this afternoon, I went outside for a few more for dinner. Today was the first day we had cucumber - and you will see I picked 3 today!