The Garden 2012

One of the best things about moving out of our house in pittsburgh was getting to say goodbye to my so called garden. That garden was such a nightmare.... built into a hill, crappy soil, and peppered with poison ivy! I don't miss it one bit! 

John and I got hit with the gardening bug pretty hard when we were in graduate school at Michigan state. We lived next door to farmer Fred and we had acres and acs of land to plant. We grew everything.... Lettuce, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, melons, carrots, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, kolrabi, onions, leeks, beans, peas, squash, peppers, kale, sunflowers, and pumpkins. We learned about planting beans in a hill, laying tomatoes in the hole, using a string to make straight rows. We learned how to can veggies and make wilted lettuce. We learned how to dust for beetles and how to drag a field. We spent 5 years perfecting our craft. Then we graduated and got jobs and had kids and have not had a "real" garden ever since. 

This year we are going to make Fred proud! We have 2 gardens already in the works. One garden is a plot next to the shed where we planted rhubarb. We bought ourselves a rototiller, figured out where the electric lines were in the back yard and got to work. So far we have 5 rhubarb plants in the ground and things are looking good. The kids are still excited to water the plants every day. Score! The other garden is the vegetable garden which is 25x45 feet. It is huge and we are looking forward to planting it in a few weeks. The vegetable garden is close to the house and I am planning on spending a lot of time in there this summer. Our goal is to plant the rows wider than the rototiller path so that we can till the rows and keep the weeds down until the plant grow big enough. We have tons of seed packets and need to sit down and figure out what is going to go where. The kids can't wait to plant the big garden. Today Wyatt, Jonah, and Sam planted popcorn kernels in there and are hoping to grow popcorn sometime soon. They have a lot to learn, but we are looking forward to teaching them everything that we learned from Fred.