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Friday, May 4, 2012

Vegetable Garden

We are attempting a new hobby.  To be honest, I'm a little skeptical on how successful it will be.  Especially since I somehow killed every single plant I've ever owned.  But we have been talking about this for awhile, and now that I'm home most of the day, I might be successful in keeping these plants alive.

It started when our friends told us they had an old greenhouse given to them that they didn't want.  Which included these awesome cedar boards that we could have.  So after an afternoon of enjoying lunch and the boys some manual labor, we came home with these.  Matt cut them down to the appropriate size...
 ...and we built this.  A raised vegetable garden.  It's 2.5 ft x 8 ft (it's kinda hard to tell in this picture).  I was very proud of ourselves as it actually only took one weekend to do it all.  That never happens.  Matt even went and got a truck bed full of dirt and filled it up.
You see it right, folks.  That's still snow on the ground.
And I'm well aware it's already May.
Raised beds are much better here in Alaska, because the ground gets so cold. Plus our back "yard" doesn't get much sunlight due to the fence and direction our house faces, so we thought raising it will help it out a bit.  Now we just have to keep the darn moose from eating my precious fruits and veggies.

While Matt filled the bed with dirt, I went to work on planting our future dinner dishes inside.  The last frost isn't until mid-late May (just about when Texas is wrapping up their planting season), so we have to keep them indoors until then.  Yes, that means that we only have about 3 months of harvesting, but I'm determined it will be a good three months!

I did a little research on what to plant and came up with: lettuce, snow peas, squash, strawberries, raspberries and some herbs.  Seeing my little sprouts makes me so excited that I've even gotten this far!  (The middle section is my squash...it must be a late bloomer.)
My mom calls me her "hippie daughter".  I'm going to take that as a compliment.  And try not to get too excited about my results until we enjoy the fruit of our labors.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are so amazing! Great job... And yes - I mean
Hippie Daughter in a good way. All natural and organic. It reminds me of when you girls were small and I made everything from scratch and experimented with new recipes often.

Then, you all grew up and we lived in the car and always on the go... Enjoy this calm (tho sleep deprived!) season of life! It is a precious time.

Love you, Mom