The Garden

The garden idea was a rather sudden decision - made around November sometime. I spent three months on Organicgardening.com trying to research and learn everything I could in order to get started. When I was getting my certification I learned a lot about nutrition, that on top of the knowledge I had sought out through on my own, I felt that I had a pretty solid foundation about what was good, bad, ugly - what foods to eat for a flat belly, what foods you would feel like crap after eating ect. Now as I look back I can see I was missing the whole point and wasn't looking deep enough. Last year after I broke my arm and had to start from scratch on fitness I learned more about food than I ever thought possible. It all started will 100daysofrealfood.com (I highly recommend this site, she has fantastic information) - to which I shook my head and scoffed "what a fanatic." (I now take that back :)) Then to Real Food Inc. - which I had of course heard of, as I think most people have, but never really cared to watch. Ignorance is bliss right? Long story short, books, websites, blogs, news, and everything in between I could no longer ignore it and completely changed the way my family eats, earning the title of food nazi in my house, but that's a story for another day.

So to the point - I decided I wanted to grow my own food, sans chemicals and sans GMO. I bought seeds from Heirloomseeds.com. They are a wonderful small family business with all heirloom varieties and most all organic. (I don't know them, they don't know me - I'm just a very happy customer) We don't have a ton of space in the backyard and our soil is basically pure clay so I decided to do a raised bed and my very handy husband and I put this together:

Since the bed was pretty small and I had a laundry list of veggies I wanted to grow I decided to give square foot gardening a try. 50 drafts later this is my plan. I've seen some fancy excel and online versions, but this will have to do! :)
I started tomatoes, peppers, celery, black eyed susans, lavender and rosemary inside. I used a seedling heating mat and I am quite sure that the celery, lavender and rosemary seeds got fried. :( But my tomatoes look bea-utiful and I finally am getting some green showing in my pepper pot!!
The fancy chicken wire was supposed to keep out the pups, but unfortunately isn't enough. Hopefully at least the rabbits will leave it alone!

The good news was as I was inspecting the damage done by the dog - I found this:

Spinach!!! Hurray - I had all but given up on it wanting to grow. I thought I had enough time to get it started, but as it's going to be 80 degrees all week in March - we will see if it turns bitter or not....