It was very rewarding to build a new veggie garden from scratch and work on it as a family last year for the first time. It was just as fun to blog about it and leverage the opinions and expertise of the folks I have met here. Hopefully there were also a few who were inspired then or for this year to just do it for themselves as well because if I can do it, you can too and I will help.

Last Year

As a review and reminder to folks around last summer, and a recap for my newer friends, I build a box out of some old materials I had laying around from the rink I used to have in the back yard. Reclaiming a 3x20 plot of useless grass was an easy decision and I would love to replace all of my lawn to tell you the truth.

We learned a few things like:

• Asparagus is something that takes 3 or more years of growing before you get a harvest worth eating.
• Planting all Beefsteak tomatoes seems like a good idea until 10 plants all start pumping out ripe fruit at once.
• Planting corn is neat but will yield nothing but food for squirrels (plus we are surrounded by corn fields so no need to grow it)
• It is fun as hell to photograph/blog/vlog about it as a way of sharing and monitoring your own progress

We had a great yield for our first year highlighted by awesome tomatoes which may or may not have tasted even better because of the Oregano plants we surrounded them with. Some said yes but it may just have been the power of suggestion? Cucumbers and all kinds of sweet and hot peppers, green beans, berries were bountiful and such a nice treat from mid-summer on.

This Year

It seems that spring is taking its sweet time arriving fully, or we are just keen to start early this year with the indoor planting of our seeds. Giggles of excitement while buying seeds is worth the whole endeavor really for the family and the produce and Life lessons are the real benefit.

This year, we have the following changes/objectives:

• Tomatoes - 1/4 Beefsteak (awesome for eating in everything) 1/4 Cherry (some sweet variety for snacking and fancy salads/skewers) and 1/2 Roma (Pick/freeze/sauce)
• Hot Peppers - Jalapenos and Chilis like last year but adding Mad Hatter and Ghost peppers for added flavour and heat in the Pickleman Hotsauce that will be exclusively available in this community and on STEEM) I am also personally excited to take the cucumbers and hot peppers and make some spicy relish.
• Carrots - I should have a lot more/deeper earth and would like to start with some root veggies
• Cucumbers - I am trying to grow the big English Cucumbers from the seeds in the package as well as those harvested from the ones grown last year. We are also planting mini cucumbers so that we can make our own pickles.
• Flowers - Living with chicks and needing to help the bees in any way possible, we should have PLENTY of wildflowers (AKA flowering weeds) with some Milkweed (good for Monachs,) along with returning Morning Glories, Moonflowers, Begonias, Petunias, Nasturtiums, Calendula, Sunflowers, and holy shit we have a lot of breeds of flower.
• Beans - Avoiding the Peas and doubling up on a couple of different beans planted in the ground (as opposed to a large pot) to see how they do in comparison.

Shopping for seeds is one of the most fun excursions for the kids while building the garden.

With the seeds left over from last year, and the ones harvested from the produce last year, add the new ones and there are plenty. I learned that you really have to label the packets you collect otherwise your are guessing what you are planting.

Read the packets and poke holes in the soil for the seeds at the right depth. We use reusable plastic inserts that have a couple ounces of soil in them for the planting them individually. Lesson learned last year was to label each of the sections in waterproof ink otherwise it washes away and you have mystery plants.

The new addition this year is the tiny greenhouse! We stumbled upon it in our seed finding travels at a local thrift store for $40 CDN. Helps contain the mess of all the trays, and trap some more moisture so the plants can thrive in their early days. I also stole one of the aquarium lights to provide more growing light as the days grow longer and am parking it right over the heating vent so that the temperature is slightly higher like summer. We will see how this works.

This is the first official sprout of the year and it only took a couple days. It is only a flower (Zinnia I think?) so nothing to get too excited about. Unless you are my daughter.

So starts another year of growing and learning and cooperation and eating and sharing here. I hope you enjoy my bumblings and victories as we strive to build the skills of our young ones with organic activity and life skills. I would probably save money buying tomatoes at the store but the garden ones taste better, have less chemicals, and nobody on steem would give a rip for me blogging about lame supermarket chores if I passed them off as adventures.

Do you Garden? Any requests/advice for mine?