The kids and I have been talking about planing a vegetable garden for a couple of years. They were eager to grow their own produce. Our yard is tricky because gardens typically go in your backyard and ours is pretty shady. We started looking around for alternate spots and realized our side yard gets a lot of sun. We think it would be a great garden location.
Since we haven't tried to grow anything in this area, we set up our first garden in planters and large pots. That gives us the option to move them if our garden location needs adjusting and we can repurpose the pots to another spot in our yard if we decide we love gardening and want to do big raised beds in the future.
I'm going to document our process in the hopes of learning what works best in our yard. We are vegetable garden growing novices so let's learn as we go together.
Here's our process: We brainstormed a lot of our favorite vegetables and what we could grow. I did the plant and pot shopping with Leo. Kevin helped us with all the heavy lifting. And we had to do a few garden center runs together. Olive wanted to help plant and Fletcher wanted to play. It was really fun.
Our Vegetable Garden Menu:
2 Green Bell Peppers
2 Red Bell Peppers
2 Yellow Bell Peppers
1 Jalapeno Hot Pepper
2 Japanese cucumbers
5 different kids of tomatoes - Roma, Pink Brandywine Heirloom, Sun Sugar Yellow Cherry, Cherry and Grape Tomato
2 Zucchini Squash
2 Straightneck yellow squash
2 Butter Lettuce
1 Onion chives
1 Rosemary
1 Sweet Basil
23 plants! 6 cages. 10 pots. 5 bags of raised garden bed soil and 5 excited gardeners!
I need to take all the stickers off of everything and then figure out a good way to label each plant. Do you have any suggestions for garden labels or does it matter? Maybe we don't need them.
Tips:
Walmart had the best prices on large pots. These were just $7.68 each. I saw similar pots at Dollar General for $14.99 and Meijer for $30.
Meijer had the best prices on 33 inch tomato cages. They were just $1.99 each.
Find friends who garden in your area and ask them for all their help.
I'm excited to learn something brand new together as a family. My hope is that the kids will learn that they can try something new and learn along the way. That they don't have to be experts to give something a try. Here's to hoping we will be able to eat things that we grow at home this Summer.
Wish our little garden luck! And I'll take all of your vegetable growing tips!
I can't wait to follow along with your veggie garden. We can learn together! HA
ReplyDeleteThis is our second year with a veggie garden and it's just so much fun!! We expanded ours quite a bit this year but now I'm feeling a bit more overwhelmed, lol. Hopefully the plants will put up with a little less TLC because of the increased size. Your butter lettuce sounds awesome! I don't have good luck with lettuce so I'm trying spinach this year. We are also trying brussels and broccoli this year just to see how it does. Otherwise we have similar stuff as yours. We also planted snap pea seeds, which I highly recommend for kid gardeners!! Super easy to grow and my kids love picking them and eating them!
ReplyDeleteLove that you're planting a garden and its such a good idea to plant in pots so you can move if you need to! Zucchini and squash (and even cucumbers) spread REALLY wide - about 4-6 feet. The good news is they'll be able to drape down the pot which may contain some of the spread. I have a friend that trained them up a trellis once and said it worked well. I've always wondered if a cage would act the same. Also, your tomato cages are upside-down! I don't see it negatively affecting how the tomatoes grow, as they still spread outside the cage even right-side up. But, the spikes are meant to be inserted into the ground to make the cage more stable! I love to plant a garden and have had fun experimenting over the years and each year learn something new!
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