How does your garden grow?

We put in our garden this week! It's not anything impressive or complicated--just a little flower bed that we put a frame around and dumped dirt into. You see, renting a house with a tiny yard just doesn't make it easy to have a garden. Our tiny yard is also shared with our neighbors, so we can't exactly just do what we want with it and fix it later. The only piece of dirt that is really "ours" is this 8 inch by 9 foot rocky flower bed.

I would have loved to do a full garden, but between the available "land" and my lack of energy during pregnancy, we decided it would be best to do just a salad garden. After exploring the many ideas out there for container gardening--most of which were expensive or ugly--we decide that putting a frame around the flower bed would be best. My husband found some scrap wood at Lowes (they had been frames for riding lawn mower boxes) and so was able to get all the wood for the frame for under $6. That number was much more to my liking!

He drilled some 3/8 inch holes (I think) and put stakes through them straight into the ground to hold everything in place. It works like a charm (so far)! We thought about going a bit deeper, but decided to see if what we have will work...so our raised flower bed is only about 6 inches deep. This is all an experiment anyways, so, yeah, might as well be adventerous!

I filled it up with dirt, marked off my sections and planted some seeds. I had thought about starting all my seeds before the warm weather showed up, but I couldn't find a toddler-safe place for my seeds. :)

We planted baby romaine lettuce, royal red lettuce, simpson elite lettuce, mesclun mixed lettuce, green onions, radishes, carrots, bush beans, sugar peas, cilantro, oregano, thyme, parsley, bell peppers, and cherry tomatoes. That sounds like a lot, but we only planted a few of each.

The herbs, bell pepper, and cherry tomato that won't go in the garden. The herbs will go around the tomato plant in its 10 gallon container and the bell pepper will hopefully go in the ground in front of our little porch... we'll see how it does there.

And a few gratuitous shots of my little helper "helping" mix the dirt in my tomato pot.

She loves mixing everything she can.

Happy growing!
~Regina

Where I've Been and Earth Day...

I've been meaning to update for a couple weeks but have been putting it off. However, one of my blogger friends, Becky, suggested I write an Earth Day post inspired by The Sage Butterfly. So, first my update then my Earth Day thoughts. :)

Update (AKA Where in the world did I go???):

So, shortly before dropping off the face of the earth, I decided I was going to try to post once a week (since twice a week was too much for me). What I had not anticipated was being wiped out by morning sickness shortly after making that commitment--mind you, the pregnancy is totally planned, but the wiped out part wasn't. Is it ever? For the past 3 months or more, I've been just trying to keep up on the bare minimum around the house. My husband even took over all the cooking of major meals, all grocery shopping, and most of the cleaning around the house. I am almost 19 weeks along now and am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I've had breaks from the sickness over the past couple weeks and they've started to get longer. I'm hoping I'll be able to function like a normal human being soon! :) Soon I'm hoping to restart posting here (I have done some crafting despite being wiped out), but first I have to return to posting on my family blog--or my mother would have my head! She reads both, you know. ;) (Hi mom!)


Earth Day:

I'm going to totally break the rules on this one, but that's ok. Here's what I'm supposed to write about: "List at least three books that inspired you to perform any sustainable living act or inspired you to live green, and then tell us why they inspired you. These books do not have to be about green living. Nonfiction and fiction apply." A full list of the rules can be found at The Sage Butterfly.

First, a short tangent: I'm not exactly a fine specimen of green or sustainable living. However, I think I can say that we, as a family, are at the beginning of our "journey" and as we become more established in life we will find it more and more natural to move along this path of moderate "greenness." I would say that we're just trying to be responsible for the world around us as much as is possible for us at our time of life. Now, on to the books...and breaking the rules... ;)


To start off, I would have to say that cookbooks, in general, have been a huge part of my inspiration to be more natural. My mother cooked most of our food from scratch and I picked up a love of cooking and baking early on. It was not until I was on my own that I began to translate this love of cooking into a desire to use more natural, even home-grown, ingredients. But I would have to say that my awareness of the importance of as-close-to-natural-as-possible ingredients started with my love of making food.

Next, I would have to say that a wide variety of blogs (not books, but oh well!) have given me much more specific inspiration and instruction on how to live more naturally and sustainably. I would never have thought to try half the things I have, especially when it comes to sewing and reusing items, if it had not been for the ideas that pop up in my reader feed. A few of my favorites: Tipnut (Tips and projects collected from around the internet on how to tackle all sorts of tasks around the house.), Lifehacker (Another blog that collects articles, as well as produces some of its own, on practical tips for doing things in life--has a much wider variety than Tipnut.) , and Frugal Babe (A working at home mom shares stories about her family's ways of achieving frugality and minimalism.)

Finally--it took me forever to think of the title of a specific book that inspired me to think about natural living--I loved the story The Island of Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. It's been years since I read it, but for a quick summary: it tells the story of a young teen girl who is somehow left behind when her tribe leaves her island for a new land. She manages to survive on her own and overcome many difficulties using next to nothing (since her people took everything with them!). It concludes with a happy ending. :) As a girl of 13 or 14, I remember being amazed at how much the main character was able to do with so little. Many of the things she knew or figured out (like how to weave a skirt with plant fibers), I hadn't even considered as the basis (possibly) of our modern ways of doing things.

So there you go: my three "green," "sustainable," or "natural" living reading sources. I broke about 10 of the 5 or 6 rules, but I did manage to finish the post before the end of Earth Day. Run over to The Sage Butterfly for a great list of gardening blogs that she invited to participate (at the bottom of the post) and who all likely followed the directions better than I did. :)

~Regina