Gardening

My good friend Laura really motivated us towards planting a garden this year. Mark has wanted to plant a garden for a long time. I am fairly neutral on the subject not really opposed to it but not really excited either.  Laura is planting a huge garden in her yard so when she offered to start some seedlings for us I knew we were about to become gardeners.  We knew where we live there would be an issue with deer and our yard is not really flat anywhere so we would need to make some raised garden beds, that part was easy but trying to figure out how to keep them safe took some good researching. We finally found an idea that looked good and this week for FHE we bought our supplies and started putting it together.

Mark built a 4 x 4 bed to plant in and then we worked on the removable protective cover together.  He screwed eye hooks into the corners and then we stuck the PVC Pipe into them to help it hold its shape and stay up.  We then took some garden mesh and tied it onto the PVC Pipe with electrical ties.  Its nice that we can easily lift it off to weed, water and hopefully harvest our crops.  Mark has already commented that if this work's well this year he wants to build another one for next year. We will see how it goes.  We planted (Well Laura started for us) garden beans, zucchini, cantaloupe, and watermelon.  We let Jared and Lydia each pick some seeds at the store for FHE and hope they will have enjoy watching their plants grow. Lydia picked some snap peas and Jared actually picked Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins.  We will wait to to plant those till July.

Since this was supposed to be our FHE activity (it took us three days to get it all done) we had our treat tonight. I thought it would be fun to have a garden themed treat (we rarely have themed treats) so I made some chocolate frosting and had Jared and Lydia spread it on a graham cracker. This was their garden bed and soil.  They then planted their gardens with M and M's.  What I love most about this was that I came up with the idea all by myself, no Internet needed this time. They loved it.  We will see if our garden grows or gets eaten by animals.