Winter Garden

We planted one square foot garden on January 29th to be our little winter garden.

There is cilantro, spinach, several types of lettuce, kale, bok choy, brocolli, cabbage, and brussel sprouts.

One month later and it has already provided us so much.  The best part it has only been water with rain water.  The first couple of days we hand watered from our rain barrel and since then for basically a whole month it has survived on rain water from the sky.

Everything is still alive, plus we have added a dill transplant from another area of our yard, a lettuce transplant from another area of our yard and dozens of little tomato plants that have come up in our bed.

What a pleasure it has been to share this with Cullen, he ate his first piece of lettuce from this little garden. He loves to visit the plants and to watch the leaves blow in the wind.  I especially can not wait until our broccoli produces, we have been eating a lot of steamed broccoli as a family.

This past weekend I was looking for weeds in the garden and found we have dozens of little tomato plants from our fall cherry, pear, and orange tomatoes.  Super excited to watch them grow.  We are really looking forward to having tomatoes in the summer, Cullen loves to eat tomatoes, and we fully expect him to be eating them fresh off the plant.

We have spent years working on our square foot gardens and I can tell you our three biggest assets have been investing in good soil, a rain barrel, and Square Foot Gardening Guide.  Another thing we have found valuable and time saving is we do not mess with seeds.  We buy transplants.  I know seeds are inexpensive but when you only need a few plants, transplants have truly been a money and time saver.  Seeds are time consuming to get started plus a lot of them you start indoors then transplant.  I would love to have the space and time to do this but right now we do not.  Once I accepted this and stopped messing with them life has been much easier in the garden.  

One more great lesson from our garden, not every plant works well in your back yard.  I use to get so discouraged when a plant did not work out, die, not produce, what have you.  It's ok to have trial and error.  Try again, try something new, or just raise more of what you know has proven itself.  The first years of our garden were a lot of this.  Trying too many things, trying too many of one thing, learning, learning, learning.  I have seen so many people in this phase just give up on gardening altogether...Don't! To me this is the fun part. Every season is going to bring a new challenge and new delight - embrace them!  So far this has been our best garden yet...and it is only winter.  I CAN NOT WAIT to see what the rest of the seasons will bring.