Growing Stuff

In honor of Earth Day tomorrow, I figured I'd tell you about our garden. This is our third year of gardening, and it's exciting because we get better every year.

It all starts with compost.


We save our non-meat food scraps in a little container in the kitchen and then dump it outside into this hulking brute when it fills up. It's important not to throw meat bits into the compost because it will prevent scavenging type animals from being interested in your bin. There are lots of resources online for composting, but mostly you're supposed to alternate layers of kitchen scraps with outdoorsy stuff like grass clippings or raked leaves, and then every once in awhile you also turn the compost with a shovel to speed up the breakdown process. We never get to those parts. But it works just fine for us to collect our kitchen scraps, hence cutting down our garbage for the landfill. We would get more of the finished product (nutrient-rich dirt) if we did follow those steps.

Next is a place to plant.

Senpai is extremely proud of these raised garden beds that he made out of scrap wood that had been accumulating from all of our construction projects. I don't blame him.

This is what they started as:

Add some plants, lots of dirt, and compost, and now they look like this!


There's another garden on the side of our house.

All together, we're growing herbs, onions, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, strawberries, raspberries, and lettuces.

I'm so excited for our crops to grow! Since we're getting so much better at growing food, I'm starting to get more comfortable with the idea of growing flowers, too. I used to think I had a black thumb, but to my surprise, I have successfully kept a few plants alive for awhile. I figured it was time to add more.

Remember the tulip bulbs I planted on Halloween? Look at them now!


And I love my lilac bush.

R likes it, too.

We have flower boxes with pansies in them, as well, but I haven't taken a good picture of them yet.

Well, there you have it. We like to grow stuff. I hope you get the gardening bug, too. Happy harvesting!