Growing a vegetable garden

For the first time in several years, I decided to grow a vegetable garden.

This isn’t a decision I made overnight. It has been a real work in progress.

After my husband and I moved into our new house about four years ago, we had a lot of other projects on our minds; and so the backyard vegetable garden was placed on hold.

Last year, we finally decided where we wanted to put the garden and my husband and I started building a four-tired raised garden bed.

It was a lot of hard work. We decided to put the garden on the hillside next to the house. It is pretty steep and we didn’t think we would use it for anything else. It seemed like a good location.

The hardest part, in my opinion, was digging out the holes for the posts. We are on bedrock and clay and at some points we just couldn’t even get the holes dug far enough down to put the posts in. It was hard work, but after all the posts were in, my husband and I put the raised garden beds together. Since we were building them from scratch it took most of the summer.

By the fall, I was ready to put raw linseed oil on the entire raise garden bed. That was also a task. Every time the wind would blow it would get dirt all over the oil I had just put on the wood, but even that task was done.

Before winter hit, my husband was working hard to get a staircase done along one side of the raised garden bed. This way we would have a nice surface to walk up and down between the house and bed. He was unable to finish that portion of the project until this summer, but it is done now.

Before planting my garden, my husband came up with a great water-sprinkling system, which let’s face it, around here is kind of a necessity.

This year, my five-year-old son, Matthew and I put the garden in. He would help from time to time before getting bored and going to play on the play set. He also helped me pick out some things to plant, which I tried to explain to him are hard to grow here, but we will try. Some of the things he picked out were watermelon, cantaloupe, cucumbers, pumpkins and broccoli. I stuck with more traditional items, such as radishes, onions, lettuce, spinach, zucchini, yellow squash, beans, peas, carrots, kale and corn. I also planted some potted plants, including tomatoes, peppers, mint, lemon balm, oregano and chive plants.

I am new to the herbs, so I am learning all about those. I have already learned that nothing in the store compares to fresh picked oregano leaves.

So far, things were going pretty good. That is until the flood. Most of my corn was blown down and one whole bed was flooded for a couple of days with water. However, I was able to straighten the corn and the water has since dried up.

I have harvested some spinach, lettuce, onions and radishes, but I am patiently waiting for the rest of the garden to get caught up. I know that when all of it starts producing I will probably be overwhelmed. I have about 12 tomatoes I am waiting to ripen, four banana peppers and four bell peppers. I can’t wait for them to be ready.

There is just something exciting about going out to your own garden and getting something to eat. Plus, my sons are learning about growing their own food.