Gardening and Composting

I have wanted a garden for a long time but we have always lived in an apartment.  Well, now that we have a rental house we are still kind of limited so my dad said we could plant one at their house!  I was so excited, especially because he's got a super green-thumb and I knew he would help keep me from killing our plants!

Ground breaking

 Tristan and my dad put together the bed frame while Ethan "helped" turn the soil.

 A better view of the size of the garden bed.  Now it just needed plants!

 In the meantime, we decided to start composting because we don't have a garbage disposal in our house.  We figured it would help cut down on our garbage and then we could use the compost on our garden.  Win-win!  We ended up deciding to use worms in our compost since their waste is super nutrient dense for plants, plus they help decompose your food faster.  You have to use a certain kind of worms--red worms.  Believe it or not, we ordered them online!  They arrived in our mailbox all ready to go.  Ethan was all excited to see the worms.

 I think he wasn't sure what to think at this point.  I couldn't get a good picture of the worms because they were all buried in the dirt, but Ethan really likes them.  I have to admit, the bin is kind of at a gross point right now.  We are still learning and working out the kinks.  We lost a hand full of worms because we didn't have a good enough drainage system worked out and they drowned and now we are battling maggots (sorry, I know it's super gross).  We need to get some screening to seal up the ventilation holes and keep flies out and then we should be all good.  Some people like maggots in their compost, but we do NOT.  Hopefully we can make this work!

 The garden is doing great!  We have already started harvesting lettuce.  We have green leaf, red leaf and one other green variety I can't remember the name of right now.

 My dad's strawberry plants are also exploding right now.  It's early in the season, so they aren't as sweet as they can be, but man are they still good!  Ethan loves them and at practically all of these in one sitting!

 Here's a look at the garden now!  We've come a long way!

 The corn is starting to come up!

 Iceberg lettuce is starting to form heads.  It's amazing to watch how the leaves just curl in to form the head of lettuce.

 The beginning of some broccoli!

 We also have cauliflower, cucumbers, peppers, carrots, green beans, sugar snap peas, radishes, and cabbage planted.  Hopefully they will do well also.  My dad also recently purchased a blueberry and raspberry bush.  It's a lot of fun to see the plants grow.  We don't get to help him work on it as much as I would like, but he swears it doesn't need all that much maintenance other than watering at this point.

Tristan and I have a sweet, yellow tomato plant at our house now and it has started to form some fruit!  I'm super excited for them to ripen!

 We also brought over some pots with some carrots in them since we way overplanted and hand too many to keep in the garden bed.  We transplanted them to these pots and are hoping they are going to do o.k.

We also recently discovered that there are mint plants already planted here at our house.  So we have quite a few things going on!  We are learning some things that we would like to do differently next year and my dad says he would like to DOUBLE the size of the garden next year so we can have more corn planted.  Apparently you need to have a certain amount planted in order for it to fertilize properly, so we're not sure if we'll get anything out of it this year.  Either way it's a fun and super yummy learning opportunity!