How Does Your Garden Grow?

Since we are talking about veggies this week, lets take a post and talk about gardening.

For some of you, planting has long come and gone, but for us Northerners, we're just getting started. In the last 3 weeks we started planting some of our early things, so here are a few pictures and details of what we've been doing.

Here is our garden plot:

Yeah, it is pretty big, but there are a lot of us to feed! Dad borrowed a tractor from a man in our church to till it all up good. After living in North Carolina for 5 years, I still can't get over the beautiful brown soil!

The first thing to go in were peas.

We planted three rows. Here you can see our little pink seeds, dropped in a pattern of 4, 3, 4, 3, etc. all down the row. That is so we can put a fence down the middle of each row.

Peas are a nice, easy seed to plant. I like 'em.

We also planted radishes, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, turnip, onion, brusselsprouts and spinach so far. Just a little bit of each of these. Here are the peas already coming up! (After maybe 2 weeks? Not sure exactly)

And some radishes are up, too! No, we don't live in a desert...there was obviously standing water here after the last rain storm!

That is where we are so far in that garden. When we get back next week we'll have to do a lot more planting. We'll be putting in lots of beans, cucumbers, some corn, pumpkin, and I'm not sure what all else Mom has planned. :)

We are also branching out and trying something new this year...a Strawberry patch! 

This picture makes it look a lot bigger than it is! It is really just big enough for 4 rows of strawberry plants and a little half row of some asparagus we started. It takes 3 years before we can eat the asparagus, so for now we're just putting it in the ground.

We got 90 strawberry plants, and can you believe they all came in this teeny box?

We were expecting plants but really they just came as a little bit of growth and a whole lotta roots. So really, we ordered 90 strawberry root systems, haha!

Here is what one looks like, all planted on its little hill:

Each of the dark spots is a plant, which we watered after they were all planted. And actually, the "instructions" said that they needed to be planted on a cloudy day, so the little tiny plants wouldn't be shocked by the sun. But by the time we were finished, the sun had come out. Oops. They seemed to do ok anyway. Oh, hello shadow!

As to the kind of strawberries, ours are called "Everbearing." We should get some this year, but next year will be a really big year. They will have one big crop in June, and then they are supposed to be mowed down. (Yikes!) Then they should produce another big crop that same year, and continue to produce until frost. This first year we won't get two big crops like that, but we should get plenty for our own use throughout the summer. I for one am looking forward to it!

All of our seeds and strawberry plants we ordered from Vessey's seeds, a company based out of PEI. For any local Nova Scotia peeps, it is a great place to order seeds from. This will be our second year using exclusively their seeds, and so far we are happy with them! (I also see that they do ship to the US, so you can look into that if you are interested!)

So far things aren't looking too awfully exciting in the gardening department, but before long plants and weeds will be in full swing! I'll be sure to post updates as well as other gardening tips and tricks we dig up along the way. (Dig up...get it?)

Who else is planting a garden? When do you plant? What things are already sprouting for you?