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Recovery

Well it's been two weeks since the hail storm and amazingly our plants are bouncing back.  There are flowers on the tomatoes.  The Swiss Chard is coming back as well as the Sweet Peas.  Now we did go out and buy another tomato plant at the farmers market yesterday that already had some baby tomatoes starting to form.  We just wanted to make sure that we actually have tomatos.  Fresh grown tomatos just taste so much better than the ones from the grocery store.

OH Hail No!

Today we came home to a mess - a huge hail storm shredded our poor garden.  Makes you truly appreciate what true farmers go through.

We have Salad!

   Today was quite exciting - we were able to harvest the first of our Sweet Salad Mix!  We were going to a BBQ at Mom & Dad's, so decided to take it with us to share our harvest

Looking Good

So a few more weeks into our garden and things are looking up.  It really is exciting to come home everyday and see what has changed.  In fact today, we were able to eat the first of the fruits of our labor - a couple of strawberries! 

Make sure to take a look at our continuing growing garden in the photos to the right - or click here

Already some casualties..

Well a few weeks into gardening and some of our sprouts have bit the dust.  We're not sure if they just weren't strong enough or if it was too hot too fast for them, but our tomatoes from seeds are gone, as is the basil.  Some of the carrots survived but not all of them.  But all is not lost, there is new growth on the Sweet Garden Mix and the Sweet Peas.  Our Cherry tree seems to be thriving and the Potatoes look amazing!

In continuing our gardening bug, we decided to move the river rock from a large section by the back gate so that we can plant several strawberries plants, a blackberry bush, and a couple of blueberry bushes. 

Download Garden diagram

Our Square Foot Garden - baby steps

Back in February, Glenn comes home with a book called "Square Foot Gardening" and thinks we should give it try.  He has never tried gardening before and this seems like an easy concept.  My Dad grew up on a farm in Indiana and we had a large garden when I was growing up, but I was too young to fully appreciate it.  So I'm certainly no farmer, but know that I have someone to call if we have questions (isn't that what Dads are for?). 

Anyways, we start looking through the book and getting the main concept down.  First thing, is to build the frame and get the ingredients for "Mel's Special Mix".  After you get that built, well the gardening bug just really hits.  We were finding that we were going to Lowe's often and looking through all the seed packets.  We decided that we also wanted to plant fruit trees, so we got a Pear and a Cherry.  And the weather was teasing us - we had 80 degree days in March - we wanted to plant.  So we went ahead and planted our seeds indoors - we figured by the time they were ready, the weather would be too.  We went ahead and planted the potatoes, because they are a cold hardy.  Of course, that's when we started to get the heaviest snow of the season - here we had these lovely sprouts and 2 feet of snow on the ground.

We planted the Cherry tree on April 26th, but it doesn't appear that the Pear tree survived that big snow storm.  And after hardening the sprouts for several days outdoors, we were finally able to plant them on May 2nd!  It was so nice seeing our beautiful sprouts actually in the ground.  Now the hard part will be watching and hoping that they grow!

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