Garden Build and Edit
My garden journey started basically as soon as I could go outside. A joke, but actually not too far off. My dad is a gardener, and has been for my whole life as he grew up gardening with his grandpa. He has a huge fenced in garden that I grew up helping plant, weed and harvest on a daily basis. Our first few years of marriage I was adamant that I didn’t want a garden, now for sure and maybe ever. Then we bought our house and I finally had the space, physically and mentally, to think about this and the desire to grow fresh food for my family and have the kids be able to walk out and grab a cherry tomato or snap pea off the vine and snack on it got me excited.
I started with strawberries and this little patch in the first picture. After two years of that and two new cats, I realized that our cats were using my garden as a litter box, bleh. So I decided to build a couple of raised garden beds from a plan I found on Pinterest. Originally I had a bed in front of our living room window(2nd pic) but that one didn’t get enough sun, so this year I moved it over and built another one next to it which you can see in the picture below. This year I added two apple trees that will be put in the ground this fall, got them bare root so $30 instead of $60+ and decorative pumpkins which I got as starts from my dad. My kids love to go out every day and in between bike laps and grab a snap pea or 5 and my son also loves snacking on parsley, like my sister used to do. I can’t wait until the apple trees are big enough that the kids can happily snack on apples whenever they please. The tree on the right actually has some little apples this year which is crazy but so far they are staying pretty small.
If this inspires you to want to start gardening I’d encourage you to start with a container herb garden. I currently have rosemary, chives, and basil. Normally I also have parsley and sometimes cilantro and dill but this year those plants died. Cooking with fresh herbs is an instant meal upgrade and is super healthy for you too! Another easy idea is growing sprouts or micro greens which you can do in a window year round and they are super healthy for you.
Do you have any questions, comments, or ideas? Comment and I’d love to chat with you!
