E is my sweet son, who is almost 9. He loves math and science thus gardening is the perfect complement. He love watching things grow and in his free time makes a comic called Stuntman.
Me- I work full time at work and try my best to keep the house clean (though I must say it will never be spotless). My job is at a school but not with the school. My program does a summer residential component which means as long as I have this job we will probably not have a huge garden in the summer as I am only home on the weekends.
There is also PB my sweet husband and son's stepdad. He is a teacher and is the main plant waterer during the summer.
Since we can't have a large garden we have taken to planting in beds around the house. It started with a few plants when Ethan was about 4 in the flower bed in front of the house. We did that for a few years, growing just enough to enjoy it. Mostly cucumbers, turnips, carrots and lettuce (all picked by E). One of the first things we planted was a strawberry plant which has continued growing each year.
This last summer I dug up along the side of the house and a little section behind that is between the bottom patio and the back porch steps. It sort of an odd configuration with part of it under the top porch steps. We planted turnips, onions and carrots under this section as they don't need much vertical room. Along the side we planted tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers which all did well.There is also a small strip that we have a grape plant growing in. We had actually bought it the previous year, but it didn't grow much at all where we had it planted. This last year it grew quite a bit so there is hope I supposed. We don't know much about pruning it though so if anyone has any advice that would be greatly appreciated.
We tried potatoes for the first time, and had lackluster success- I think that we needed to put them in deeper and hill them more? Our herbs did pretty well, I never realized how much parsley can grow. In fact it is still growing even through some cold weather. Though we are in the South so our cold is not nearly as cold as in the North.
There is what we've done so far- next time we'll talk a lil about our adventure trying a sort of lasagna garden overwintering this year.
Update: I just noticed how you can upload photos ... lol... so easy- I feel a lil silly :) - These are from the early parts of last summer- I was too busy to get photos when they really came in, and I neglected to get a photo of the front gardening area.
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