Organic learning~Gardening

Our most recent adventures in Organically learning started about a month ago when we sat around talking about our food budget. We spend a significant amount of money on fresh produce weekly. The kids and I sat around talking about ways we could cut our grocery bill even more in an attempt to save what money we could in our limited budget. This sparked a discussion on gardening. We have a good area where we could plant a garden and I had seeds left over from last year when we co-planted with my parents at their place.

We talked about what a garden should have in it and what were the best ways to grow food without using tons of pesticides to keep our food growing healthy. We studied Square foot Gardening http://www.squarefootgardening.com/ , it is a great way to garden in small spaces. We also studied Companion planting http://www.planetnatural.com/site/companion-planting.html and learned what we could plant together in our small boxes to grow together. This provides the best of both worlds. In our 3 four foot by four foot boxes we decided what to plant where. It took two days to decide what to plant where and how much we could get in each box.

Here are pictures of the boxes empty.

After all our studying we started applying what we learned. In the box farthest from the picture we inter-planted Corn and Pole beans slightly in front of that we planted summer squash and towards the very front we planted spinach & celery. The squash will grow between all the corn and beans and prevent weeds as well as help the spinach and celery grow well without any chemicals. We planted late in the season but everything seems to be growing well.

Here is the corn & bean box on day 4 after planting:

In our second box we planted 2 kinds of cantaloupes, 2 kinds of watermelon and cucumbers. So far only one variety of watermelon and cucumbers have come up, but both seem to be doing well.

In the last box we planted Carrots, yellow tomatoes, red & green leaf lettuce, bib lettuce, mixed bell peppers of 5 varieties including purple, red, orange, white and green. We are starting to see sprouts of some stuff in this last box but it is not growing nearly as fast as the other boxes.

It has been a few days since I took new pictures and everything has grown considerably. We also picked up 2 red raspberry plants, a blueberry plant and another variety of tomato that is planted in a smaller box we made. I will be updating our gardening blog section often with pictures. We are counting down the days until we can taste the fruits (and veggies) of our labor.

I hope through our adventures in learning Organically we are showing others the advantages to learning without books or traditional school.