learning together ~ family garden ~ the beginning

I am not a gardener, neither is my husband. But my grandparents had a big garden that pretty much sustained them, giving them vegetables, fruits, even flowers and my husband's grandfather used to garden a lot too, so we are hoping to have learned a bit from them and be able to grow a few vegetables, fruits, and some flowers too.

See the garden in the background? I loved helping my grandparents.

We like to learn along with our children. They have been very excited to be gardening and were part of the whole process, preparing the dirt, pulling out weeds in the two garden patches we  built last year, deciding where and what was planted. I didn't take a lot of photos while we were planting, because we were too busy planting!

What I am planning on doing on this blog is to give you a progress report every couple of weeks of our family garden. We bought some baby plants and also planted seeds. We built two beds last year and added dirt to settle over the past winter.

Here is a list of what we have planted so far, with a few photos:

the vegetable and herb garden

cherry tomatoes

tomatoes

orange peppers and sweet red peppers

basil (the 2 ligher plants)

leeks

zucchini

cucumber

thyme

rosemary

more tomatoes

In our flower patch, we planted a few baby flower plants and a few seeds as well. I didn't take pictures of the dirt, but added a list below the last flower photo.

golden creepy jenny

an Ontario native plant: white gayfeather

beebalm

black-eyed susan

hen and chick plant

in the dirt:

sunflower (mammoth)

green peas

cosmos

four o'clock

We also planted seeds on two different walls around the house:

this one will be (hopefully!) the scarlet runner bean pole

the future nasturtium

We planted this strawberry plant last year and it is doing wonderful this year! I hope the birds leave the fruits alone so we can try them.

Lastly, the children and I asked my husband to stop cutting the grass around our maple tree. We read a great picture book called On Meadowview Street  and we were inspired to try to create our own tiny meadow right in our backyard. Once we explained our idea, my husband was game and cut the grass a little longer and in a circle around the base of the tree. It's difficult to tell right now, but he won't cut it anymore from now on, so it will grow fast. He suggested we add some wildflower seeds and topsoil in the circle to help it along. So we did! We can't wait to see how it turns out.