I’ve wanted to grow my own vegetable garden for a while. I used to have one when we lived across the road (yeah, we used to live across the road from where we live now because we are just awesome like that. When we lived in the city, the apartment we were living in was being sold so we moved just one floor down. In the same building.), but we moved just as all the vegetables were ripening. I never actually got to eat any of them. Humph.
My friend has a giant vegetable garden and is forever telling me about the Diggers Club and heirloom vegetables. That same friend and her soon to be husband, helped Aaron make two raised vegetable beds. I ordered a load of garden soil, and then Aaron and Hannah put all the dirt in the garden. Why didn’t I help, you ask? Heavy lifting/shovelling, and such things are not exactly good for a woman in her third trimester of pregnancy to be doing.
Hannah and the dirt pile
Hannah LOVED digging in the giant dirt mound, helping Daddy move dirt from the mound to the wheelbarrow, and then putting dirt on top of all the seeds that I planted in styrofoam cups with holes in the bottom (we had some lying around, so why not use them?).
oh so helpful
Aaron and Hannah set up a worm farm to give us wonderful “worm tea” to help the plants grow. Every time we go outside now, Hannah wants to see the worms. I did take photos of the making of the worm farm, but I can’t find them. Humph.
In one of the beds, I planted all the things that needed to be sown directly into the ground (colourful heirloom carrots, purple garlic, 5 colour silverbeet, perpetual spinach, long red onions, stuff like that). The other, was awaiting transplant from the seedling cups (crispmint lettuce, red lettuce, endive, broccoli, purple broccoli).
the straight in the ground garden bed
the seedling garden bed
When the sprouts from the cups were big enough, I transplanted them. Sounds easy enough, but at 31 weeks pregnant, was actually quite a difficult job. Lots of bending and getting up and down frequently. Sigh.
Flame lettuce
I was pretty buggered by the end. But, it’s all done now and soon we will have a nice variety of healthy, back to the way they are supposed to be vegetables, rather than flavorless, not very nutritious supermarket varieties.
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Mommy Adventures 