Grandma's Garden

Last weekend we got the gardens going up at my grandparents’ house. My grandpa built 2 4x8 garden beds that he surrounded with wire fences shortly after they moved up there. My grandma loves having a garden but it’s gotten more difficult to take care of it over the years so she was more than happy to let us come and take it over.

We also needed to do some weeding before we could get started. The boys liked hacking at the weeds with all the big tools.

We all met at Front Yard so we could pick out all the different fruits and veggies we wanted to plant. We bought 3 different kinds of peppers, broccoli, strawberries, 2 types of kale, tomatoes, peas, carrots, beans and watermelon. We also planted marigolds to help keep the bugs away. We’re all especially excited to see how the watermelons do.



The boys did a great job helping out. There was a lot to do so they would help a little, play a little and then come back to help again. It worked out well.





We actually ended up with too many plants for the 2 gardens and had to use containers and plant some around other trees.

In the larger garden area we planted the tomatoes, broccoli, most of the peppers and 1 of the kale varieties. We also planted the watermelon around one tree, the strawberries in 3 containers and the bush beans in a container.



The second garden got the peas, curly kale and carrots. We’re slowly planting the carrots so that they don’t all come in at the same time. We’re hoping that this way we’ll have carrots longer and not have to worry about them going bad before we can eat them all.



Around another tree we planted some peppers and bush beans. Todd and my grandpa put a fence up around it to keep the deer out. There are A LOT of deer up here.



So between what we bought for our patio garden (plants, soil and fertilizer) and what we bought for the gardens at my grandparents (LOTS of plants) we spent about $160. I would hazard to say that we will probably save 10 times that with all the food we’ll grow.

I can’t wait to see how are gardens grow and I will definitely keep you all up to date. My feelings on the gardens are that if my black thumb and me can grow veggies you surely can too. And knowing that I’ll be saving a ton of money on the produce we buy most and that I will know for sure how it’s grown (no pesticides) makes this just that much more exciting.

What was especially awesome was seeing the boys be excited about the gardens and actually saying that they’ll try the different foods that we’re growing. That and seeing how happy my grandma was about having a garden again totally made it all worthwhile for me.