Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Our Farm...


We went out to Home Depot yesterday to buy some supplies for "our farm".  That is what I decided I'd started calling our home and yard.  Micah argued profusely that our place is "way too small" to be called a farm and gerbils and fish don't count as farm animals.  I told him, "what is wrong with pretending?"  He finally agreed.  So here are a few pictures of our farm.  :)


Steve, despite terrible allergies, came out and helped me prepare the ground for my new raised garden beds.  Yeah!  I'm so excited to have more growing space!!!!!!!!  Bless Benjamin's heart, those mosquitoes loved his head.


Andrew helped as well and found a few treasures.


He came over and said in the sweetest voice, "Look at my special friend!"


In order to plant our summer vegetables we had to get the Spring vegetables out of the ground!  We will be eating a lot of salad over the next week!


The spinach was already started to go to seed so it definitely needed to come out of the ground.  I love growing spinach, it is so easy and we love spinach salads.  We grew this spinach from a pack of seeds that I got for .99 cents at a farm store.  Amazing the price difference in store bought salad greens verses home grown from seed.


We are trying potatos for the first time this year.  I'm so excited to see what happens!  I didn't have newspaper to line the ground with so I just used some white paper from a roll I just got at the thrift store.  


The boys helped me cover the potatoes with lots of hay.


We released the earthworms from our earth worm nursery into the garden.  I can't believe these survived despite the fact that I would forget for days at a time to feed them and add water to their soil.


This is Micah depositing a worm next to our newly planted tomatoes.  Since I'm late planting in the season I decided to forgo planting from seed and I went ahead and bought 8 different varieties of tomatoes from Home Depot.  We even bought a funky strange yellow stripey tomato for fun.  


So from the back I have 4 tomato plants, then the potatoes, then four more tomato plants that I will need to build another frame for, then 8 square feet of carrots, and the last will be 4 cucumber plants and 16 green bean plants.  I use the square foot gardening technique to grow more in less space.  So 16 plants may sound crazy but you can plant 8 green bean seeds in one square foot and then they will grow vertically.  I just need to finish up the frame with some string that the plants will grow up on.  I didn't actually plant the cucumbers and green beans today because one of my boys thoroughly aggravated an ant mound that was right in the corner where I will be planting those and there were ants running all around that soil.  Maybe they will leave?  I hope so.


Here is my new beds.  In the bed in the back Andrew planted a few squash seeds.  I asked him if he would eat them since he planted them.  He said frankly, NO.   The bed along the back has one lemon balm plant that I bought from Home Depot because my lemon balm that I was growing from seed died when I went on my trip to Virginia and I'm impatient about waiting for the new seeds to sprout. Although I am trying again and if any of them do well I will transplant another one on the other side of that bed.  I just wanted one lemon balm plant for sure.  I've been craving lemon balm tea.  The bed in the front Micah planted two cantaloupe plants.  Those seeds have been in my fridge since 2007 so I'm not sure if they will sprout. We'll see I guess!




Here is Aden's garden in the front yard.  We planted a tree for the baby that we lost whom we named Aden.  It became much more than just a tree as you can see.  I love this garden and I am looking forward to adding more to it this year.  I think I'm going to try planting my herbs in this garden.  It gets full sun so I think it is a good spot.  We have two blueberry bushes in the back left which we love.  Nothing like picking fresh blueberries from your yard!


These bloom with tall beautiful white daisies.  (which I love)




I grew Dahlia from seed.  Here is one of the seedlings.  I've never grown anything from seed indoors and transplanted outdoors.  We will see if they survive!  I hope so!




The boys ate, after their quesidillas for lunch, HUGE mountains of salad.  Just leaves and Italian dressing.  


This is Isaac's SECOND helping.


                                                          Even Benjamin was amazed!!!!!!!

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