My babies...

I'm really into this gardening thing right now, especially the seed starting. The changes taking place with the seedlings are so rapid that you can go down and look at them in the morning, and when you come back in the afternoon there will be twice as many seeds that have sprouted. It's pretty cool. It's bringing out the mother in me.


To get you up to speed, we started the seeds indoors a couple of weeks ago. In the middle of last week, we built a second garden for our side yard, using the methods described in Square Foot Gardening. Per the Mel's Mix recipe, we used five kinds of compost of our choosing: steer manure, mushroom compost, chicken manure, earthworm castings, and mulch/compost from our own pile in the backyard. Just so you know, chicken manure is some nasty smelling stuff - very nasty. Hold your nose. Or make your kids mix the compost together. Blech. Mushroom isn't much better. Consider yourself warned. (It's nearly impossible to see in the above photo, but the walla walla sweet onion have indeed sprouted.)


The box we built needed a deeper section for growing carrots, so we bought some extra hardware and managed to put something together. I think it turned out pretty good! This weekend we hit a sale at Rite-Aid, and bought some strawberry plants, cosmos, marigolds, violas, and snapdragons. We started the carrot seeds directly in the garden, and already transplanted four of the spinach. They seem to be doing alright. I also planted radishes and peas in the back garden, but then the dog trounced through, so we'll have to wait and see whether or not they survived. I've since put up a small fence.