Growing things

The birthday party is done and I am 30 weeks pregnant tomorrow with no nursery set up (although we've had an epiphany about that, but that's for another post.) so what am I going to occupy my time with?

My very first garden not including the one when I was a wee child and let my Mother and brother do all the work and then just raked it and said how much work I did. I am not completely insane, so I'm starting small. We bought one (and then two) of those 4x4 raised bed gardens from the Depot:

And decided to put it here, outside of our fenced yard. It might make more sense to put it IN a fenced yard, but I'm pretty sure Haze would help herself and the fence doesn't keep rabbits out anyway and Vader chose this spot and I wasn't going to argue because I have better arguments coming up (painting the boys' room!). 

I bought my plants from Yonder Farms and Hewitts. When I first started planning the garden I had imagined growing all the vegetables we eat and had a huge list. And then remembered my huge abdomen and that if I go too crazy and it all fails I will say screw it and never try again. So, I cut way back and decided to stick with just 4 different types of vegetables: grape tomatoes, red peppers, green beans and cucumbers. I got the bush variety of both the green beans and the cucumbers because I didn't want to have to deal with trellises and things of that nature. The one cup by itself is the tomato plant that SkyWalker brought home from school for mother's day. I wish I knew what kind of tomato plant it is... the rest I have are grape tomatoes because that's what we eat more often, but it would be nice to have a "regular" tomato plant as well. 

Although it was completely unnecessary because of the size of the garden and the limited number of plants I chose, I had the girls decorate some wooden spoons to use as garden markers. Mostly so that they were involved and because they were bugging me about something and I needed to distract them. The Princess drew the pictures, I wrote the words:

While I was food shopping, Vader and the girls set the raised beds up. Yes, the girls, no boy because he was far too sweaty and hot and blah blah complain. Although we originally bought one bed many moons ago, Vader decided to buy another one to stack them. This way the soil is deeper, I may not have to worry as much about weeds coming up, we can hopefully keep those damn bunnies away, and I won't have to bend/kneel as much. Occasionally he does think of my well being. He burned a square patch (he has a propane um, burner thingy to burn up weeds along the fence), then used sand to level everything because our yard is anything but level. 

After I got home we set everything up:

I did all planting with the Princess and Chewie "assisting". The Princess actually did do a fair amount of it. SkyWalker helped put his plant in, but then had Chewie actually place it in the soil. Which was nice of him to share, but also a way for him to get out of actually doing anything. Apples, trees. We found tomato cages in the lean-to in our backyard. I bought little fences to keep the cucumbers separate because that's what I was told to do. We planted marigolds around to keep the bunnies away. After all the planting was done Vader decided to mulch around it as well because he has an obsession with mulch. 

If I manage to not kill anything and get actual vegetables we'll get another set next year and go crazy! Lettuce and kale and carrots oh my! I hope it all works out because I'd like to be able to freeze some of the green beans to use this winter as purees for Quattro. That would be awesome. I would also like to expand to fruits too and grow strawberries and blueberries and other dirty dozens...