Two Parents and Three Kids: It's Gardening Time!

Big Sis, Big Bro, and Little Bro doing more digging than weeding

Sometime within the past couple years the idea of growing a garden began tumbling around my brain. I toyed with the idea, but dismissed it because, well frankly, I didn’t know where to start. That is a really shameful admission because even in my earliest memories, my grandmother has always had a flourishing garden with fruits and vegetables galore—she even raised chickens for a while. But as much as I admire her gardening skill, her green thumb did not rub off on me. As a matter of fact, until a few years ago my allergies were so bad that I didn’t even consider meddling around in anyone’s yard. I could barely make it outside before having a sneezing attack. But that was a few years ago. I’m not sure why I am no longer suffering like before, but I figure I better take advantage of this allergy free moment in my life and get my gardening on!

So—after saturating my “gardening” board on Pinterest with ideas and tips, I felt like I’d developed a good idea of what I wanted to do. I ended up with the following list:

Sungold tomatoes

lemon cucumbers

red, yellow, and orange bell pepper

iceberg lettuce

green leaf lettuce

green beans

zucchini

If my garden actually grows, I’ll save myself some coins in the produce department for sure.

At this point, I’m still not 100% confident in my gardening skills, so I relapsed into my nerdy ways and do what anyone who needs to learn how to do something does—I hit up the library and checked out some gardening books. I know this shows my age, but no matter how many online tutorials I watch, sometimes I don’t “get it” until I read it in a book. Little House In the Suburbs: Backyard farming and home skills for self-sufficient living by Caswell and Siskin was such a good resource.

Preparing my mind for gardening

I didn’t read the whole thing, but the introduction had me super motivated to get started. If I ever develop enough patience to attempt to raise chickens, goats, or bees, I know where to look.

So after boosting my confidence, I realized we needed a clear space for this garden. Somewhere we could get full sun exposure for 6-8 hours. The side of my house was perfect, except for the fact that that was where we stored our garbage cans and any other random items we wanted hidden from our visitors. It was overrun with weeds, a rusty, barrel style barbecue pit, and random recyclables from the many times I’ve attempted to get the kids to sort cans, plastics, and bottles. There was also the beginning of an outdoor project that Hubby and I started by laying paver stones, but never got around to completing. So it looked like I was going to have to pull weeds and haul garbage and heavy paver stones before I could get started on my garden. That certainly put a damper on my garden starting enthusiasm but I didn’t let it discourage me. I enlisted my three garden helpers (Big sis, Big Bro, and Little Bro) and we got to work.

Big Bro quickly realized that he had been tricked into cleaning up the backyard under the guise of starting a garden, so about 15 minutes into the clean up, he disappeared into the house to “go to the bathroom”. Soon thereafter I heard MarioKart from the upstairs window. Thankfully, the other two didn’t bail on me until the space was free of random items.

Doesn't look like much, but you should've seen the randomness we cleared

But that was only the beginning.

I was 80% sure I wanted to build raised beds, but after beginning the battle with those weeds and packed soil, I knew that once I cleared the weeds out and leveled the soil, I was going to start with some prepackaged “good” soil. That dirt was a beast.

Working hard

And I'm tired already

It took a couple weekends. Everyone pitched in to pull weeds (even Big Bro), and finally we cleared a space that was for the most part weed free and level.

Nice and sunny, great space for a garden

Then came the fun part: building planter boxes and planting my garden!!!

Boxes built and garden almost done

Initially, I thought building planter boxes was too difficult of a task for me to accomplish. But seeing so many diy boxes on the internet inspired me, so I talked myself into attempting to build some. And I’m so happy I did! They turned out great!

As much as I want to take all of the credit, I can’t. It was a total group effort. The whole family pitched in and the end result is great. Here are a few pictures of us getting the boxes ready.