With the spring season just around the corner, our family is beginning a yearly ritual that I have grown (no pun intended) to love – gardening!!!!

Gardening can be very rewarding – physically, emotionally and financially. The hard work that’s needed to grow your own food is all worth it when you see the end results. Gardening can also save your family money (and time!) as you are able to just walk outside and pick whatever it is you want to eat.

We began growing vegetables a number of years ago – and did not enjoy any success AT ALL our first season. Seeds were started in little kits, and when they started to sprout, we we danced for joy. After that though, our hopes for an “indoor garden” faded fast. No plant grew more than a few inches high, and no fruit ever developed. Odd…at the time I wondered where we went wrong.

After a conversation with my 90-year-old grandmother, though, I think I found my answer. She grew up on a farm and had her own garden all the years she lived up north. When I told her of my gardening woes, her first question to me was, “Do you have bees?”

Huh? Bees? “No, Grandma, we wanted an indoor garden. We kept everything inside where there are no bees.” Although it’s possible to have an indoor garden, bees help with pollination – which is where she guessed our plants stalled. I realized if the supermarkets ever went away, my grandmother would be fine and we would starve.

The next year – armed with a little more head knowledge – we started our seeds indoors, then moved them outside. We kept it simple and just planted tomatoes – and were rewarded with a great season.

Subsequent years were up and down. One year we had record heat (110 degrees!) for a few weeks and our plants took a hit. Another year we grew lots of sunflowers, ornamental corn and cherry tomatoes – so much we didn’t know what to do with them.

This year, we decided to change a few things:

• We branched out of our comfort zone and picked up seeds and starters for some fruits and vegetables we had never tried before – strawberries, carrots and parsnips to name a few.
• We bought a new gizmo – a Topsy Turvy – (see picture above) and planted our strawberry plants in it. (For strawberries, we bought plants instead of seeds, since the plants looked really healthy and we weren’t sure how seeds would do.) The plants must really love their new home, because not even three days later we started seeing flowers pop up and new “tiny” fruits. We hang it outside during the day, and bring it in at night. We’re hoping “Barry” yields quite a bit of fruit this year, as my daughter has suddenly taken a strong liking to strawberries.
• We started an herb garden. I used fresh oregano the other night in our dinner and wow, was it good.
• We expanded our garden footprint. We need more room this year to grow more fruits and vegetables, so we’ve added two new beds. They’re squared off with landscape timbers; now all we need to do is put down weed blocker and pile on the soil.

Our hope is to grow as much as we can, eat what we harvest, and freeze extra amounts for use during the year. As the season develops, I’ll keep you posted.

Is anyone else planting a garden this year? Any ideas, tips, suggestions or comments are gladly welcome!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.