Garden

I have not updated much on the garden and I think now is a good time to do so. The children and I have had so much fun going and discovering what little treats our garden has left us each and every day.

The cucumbers have been plentiful and we have shared several from our crop with friends & family. I have loved making cucumber salad with these little delicacies, or simply slicing them up and adding them to sandwiches.

creative organic learners funny face

 

Harvested cucumbers

Here are some of our squash that we harvested recently.

And then we decided that our watermelon was taking over the whole garden area, It had exploded over the box, across the yard and into the other boxes. 

moon & stars watermelon

Heart of Gold Cantaloupe

For some reason one of the watermelon's (the bigger of the two) was not ripe yet even though it felt ripe. The cantaloupe was so soft, sweet and juicy. 

Having a garden has been more fun then I could have imagined it being. I believe we will be starting some winter crops soon, we LOVE broccoli, and cauliflower, and some of the other veggies that are grown in the late fall/early winter. It is nearly time to clear out the boxes once the fruit that is still growing is finished ripening. I am disappointed that my tomatoes never really ripened, we do have some green ones on the vine and maybe I will still get some but we are quickly coming to a point where we wont have the chance for them to get ripe. 

The Garden

For those of you who were wondering how everything turned out there over the last few months here is your update!

In spite of our constantly forgetting to water things more then 2 or 3 times a week we have had an abundance of cucumbers even though all but one of my cucumber plants died off. The Watermelon took off as well, although we have not had a whole lot of fruit off the plants yet. I have a few cantaloupes that came up off the one plant that finally grew as well. The first box that contained lettuce, carrots, and bell peppers as well as a cherry tomato plant did well. We had a nice patch of carrots growing until a few weeks ago when some varmit decided to attack those delicious delicacies, pulling most of them out and eating them leaving the tops laying there, then chewing the tops off a few that it couldn't get out of the ground. My bell peppers never grew at all, I am not sure if the seeds were just old or if we never really got hot enough for peppers this year. We enjoyed many fresh salads and the children loved going out to the garden to pick the lettuce for our salads. The corn box did wonderfully well as well. We had at least 24 ears of corn on just 8 stalks of corn. We also have very large squash plants. They grew very large and we have had some wonderful large sized crook neck squash come out of the little box. The raspberries got forgotten a few times and we are hoping that they will be revived, but I am not so certain they will survive, the same for the blueberry plant.

I do not have any real recent pictures of the garden but here are a few of the ones I took just before we started to harvest stuff out of the garden. You can see the just how lush it is.

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.