I wanted to just take a minute today and share another fun aspect of our quest toward simpler living: the garden. Rachel and I are self-proclaimed gardening novices; last year we shoved some last-minute plants in the ground that did pretty well, and we have very little idea why that happened. This year, we had the chance to prepare a little more ahead of time, and the blessing of a lot more space to work with, but we’re still pretty clueless.
What we have going in our favor is that we are easily excited by projects and new ideas, so we’re tackling the garden with gusto. What we lack in experience, we make up for in spirit: our methods are sometimes chaotic, and we probably bit off more than we can chew with all the different kinds of plants we’re growing, but at least our hearts are in the right place, right?.We ordered some pretty cool seeds, including some great heirloom varieties that I’ll hopefully get the chance to show off later in the summer. The lettuce in the picture above is our first “harvest” of the season. It’s been growing pretty ambitiously, which is great because it helps appease our short attention spans as we wait for the slower vegetables to do their thing.
Here’s some pictures of our garden earlier this year when we cleared it. At the moment, everything you see as beautiful empty soil below is now covered in weeds (and the occasional vegetable), so as we wage our war against them I’ll post more pictures. The peas and some of the beans are next in line for harvest at some point, and we have high hopes for the summer vegetables as well.
this is me getting the lettuce area ready, and about to break this old rake.
Rachel planting beans, which is her second favorite garden activity after pulling weeds.
What about you all? Are you planting gardens this year? What’s been your favorite thing to grow?
Tell us about your gardening adventures– feel free to link to pictures! We’re enjoying our lettuce “firstfruits” of the season, and are really enjoying the chance to get more in touch with our food and the land.
Woot! My after-work agenda today is to de-weed our garden, as well. The peas are getting taller, the fall squash has poked out of the ground, and we’ve got a few seedlings of lettuce, peppers, and a few other veggies to plant as soon as the weather stops being bipolar. Looking forward to tracking your progress!
our squash is starting to poke up as well. We grew tomatoes and peppers from seedlings, so we’ll see how it goes– hopefully they’ll do okay. keep me posted, David!