☼ Grow your own damn Food! ☼

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These weekly posts are to share the progress of our garden; sharing photos and our gardening experiments and will hopefully inspire you to grow your own garden too! :) 

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What a week in the garden!! 

So, last Tuesday we spent the day mulching the greenhouse garden bed--where our kale are still happily getting bigger and bigger. We mulched with grass clippings and it does wonders to keep weeds back and keep moisture in the soil. I don't understand not mulching, it just makes things so much easier! The kale itself has outgrown the ones we planted inside for starts, by a lot! The mustard greens are almost ready to start harvesting as well, and the radishes will be ready in a little while too. The radishes are daikon radishes, which I forgot to mention before, so they aren't ready as early as other kinds of radishes but are usually bigger. 

[mulched kale/growing collards]

I just can't believe how fast the kale is growing! We'll be harvesting in no time and will be able to keep that going throughout the whole summer and through the winter with the greenhouse. Our collards have also popped up in the greenhouse bed and are gradually getting bigger. Again, everything in that little greenhouse is doing so well! 

The peas came up and are growing quickly. So we planted another row of peas. What we did was space them out wider so that we could plant more every couple weeks so we can keep a more steady harvest instead of having them all ready at once. We'll see how that works out. We also spent Sunday building our pea trellis, out of bamboo and natural twine. I think it looks great, more earthy. It's also fun because mostly all our materials that we've been using to make our garden have been recycled or eco friendly. Even the wood we used to build the frames was from a mill that discounted the not so perfect pieces. Everything else has been reused from various places. And of course there's the swing set that makes up the netting "fence" to the pea garden bed, and helps to make the trellis that much more solid too. 

In that bed, we also planted strawberries this week! Cory sourced some out from a local gardener who sold us 40 plants for $20. Super stoked! We bought a nice strawberry planter for half the plants and the other half went in the garden bed. Super exciting! They're ever-bearing which means we'll have a steady supply throughout the summer as well.

  

We also spent Sunday putting up a fence around the front garden bed, which doesn't have anything planted yet but we're just getting ready since we already have spotted a few deer and tracks around the garden. It was quite the task, not as tall as it needs to be but it's not done yet either. 

Spinach and lettuce are slowly coming up in the other three beds. 

Yesterday we planted some more things outside as well. We mixed some more of that "starter soil" like before to give the seeds some awesome soil to start in as opposed to just the manure in the beds. And we soaked the seeds in fertilizer solution for about an hour before planting them in the ground. 

We planted some broccoli next to the spinach, and some swiss chard in the back of that bed. We planted some spinach and also transplanted some of our lettuce starts in the far bed. 

Oh, and Cory planted a few cucumber seeds in between the rows of peas at the base of the trellis. And we put a frost cover over the second bed with the spinach and new broccoli and chards.  

We've started climatizing our starts this week, to get them used to the weather outside and change, meaning we take the outside for a couple hours every day. 

Oh and the cucumber and zucchinis!!! Remember how we soaked and planted them last week? Well, they are HUGE! It's funny to compare to last year because even when we planted our starts last year they were these measly pathetic looking things that tried and failed. This year they are so big and strong so I have a feeling we're going to have an awesome harvest!

And we also have a current bush from last year that is coming back to life! So many exciting things! 

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