Backyard Garden: Just the beginning.

We never thought we'd start a garden. I mean like never, ever in a million years. Why keep a garden when you can so easily get produce from the store? Why keep a garden when everything outside during the growing season seems to make me sneeze? Why battle weeds, bugs, and little furry critters for a few vegetables? Well...what it boils down to for us is this: so we know where our produce is coming from and how it is grown. So we can enjoy organic, non-GMO produce without breaking the bank. So our kids can learn about growing food and take part in the whole process. They may even enjoy their vegetables a little more knowing they had a hand at growing them.

We decided to use the Square Foot Gardening method. And honestly, finding this method is the only reason we decided to give gardening a try. It actually sounded doable for us. It is super easy, fairly inexpensive, and according to everyone we know that uses it - you'll have a great yield of produce. We're using this book to guide us through the whole process, a process which we started just over a week ago.

Rather than build our own raised bed box we went with a kit from Lowe's. Elijah loved using the drill. He now says he wants to do construction when he grows up so he can use a drill all the time. Silly boy.

We're starting small with one 4'x4' box. We plan to add more boxes next year. Being our first year we didn't want to get overwhelmed. I really hope our vegetable harvest is as plentiful as our dandelions.

Allan is mixing soil for our box. We got the recipe from the above mentioned book. This recipe guarantees growing success...which we amateurs definitely need.

After putting down some weed mat, Allan filled our little box with the freshly mixed soil. He trimmed the excess weed mat away once the box was filled.

We opted for some large clay pots to grow our tomatoes on the deck. Since they are larger plants we didn't want them to take up so much space in our little box. We'll see how it goes. We may just continue to grow them on the deck in years to come, or we may decide to grow them in a box vertically using a trellis.

We're hoping to plant our seeds and seedlings sometime this week. We had planned to over Mother's Day weekend, but had temps fall into the 30s. Kind of cold for planting. Here's hoping the weather cooperates for planting this week - I'm excited to get this thing going!

p.s. I'll be sure to post updates on our little garden throughout the growing season.