Our Garden Adventure Begins...

Believe it or not, this is the time of year us west coasters start thinking about our gardens. Cliff and I haven't quite motivated ourselves to actually DO any hands in the dirt gardening yet, but we did a lot of talking this weekend particularly about our vegetable gardens.

You might remember that last year, we built vegetable beds in our backyard. We had some luck growing peppers, celery, sugar snap peas, and squash. Learning from last year's experience though, we definitely needed more of a plan and to do more than guess what works best for growing our own veggies. We learned that it is a bit more complex than our "throw it in the dirt and it will grow" philosophy.

For the last year, I've been intrigued by my friend Stacy's blog, Growing Green. She's had such success with her gardening adventure and her experience really motivated Cliff and I to be more thoughtful this year.

In developing the plan for our garden, we learned about the book, Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work by Mel Bartholomew. This book is amazingly simple and really helped us plan our garden for the year to hopefully maximize our yield.

On Saturday, after putting our plan in place, I ordered our seeds for the year...

cucumber, beans, brussel sprouts, carrots, spinach, onions, radishes, beets, peas, leek, kale, lettuce, and swiss chard. The only plants we have yet to buy are tomatoes, red peppers, jalapenos, and our seed potatoes. We're ready for this growing season to begin!