Garden 2.0

If you were wondering what Nate was scheming about in that picture of the office, here's what it was!

A garden!

We've got:

-Lettuce
-Green Onions
-Tomatoes
-Beets
-Strawberries (lots of those!)
-Brussel Sprouts (I have no idea how those will work out, but it sounded fun)
-Celery (funny story: I looked up how to grow celery after I bought the tray, and the first sentence I see is, "Celery is a notoriously hard plant to grow; it tastes about the same when you get it from the store, so most gardeners just grow it for the challenge." Well then. Awesome.)
-Mint (peppermint AND spearmint, because that's just how we roll)
-Cilantro
-Oregano
-Rosemary (the little guy wasn't doing so hot recently, but hopefully it'll recover and become the hardy monster we expect it to be)
-Sage
-and a Lemon Verbena (apparently you can make tea with the leaves, and it smelled so amazingly good that I just had to get it)

I think that's about it... not bad for our initial run. Southern California is pretty awesome in that you can almost completely disregard any "seasonal" guidelines. It's all good.

We've got the whole "raised bed" thing going on this time, which is supposed to be advantageous, or at least that's what the gardening book told us. Nate's brother and sister came down this last weekend to help put the whole shebang together, which we greatly appreciated. We also bought a soaker hose (the black tube in the pictures), and we'll have to get a feel for using that (timing, best placement, etc), but I think it'll help us get less sporadic watering, since we don't have sprinklers back here. The idea is that you plug it into the regular hose, turn it on, and it seeps water through all the little holes in it. You leave it for a couple hours to get a decent watering.

I think that having a garden again will be good for us. I'd grown pretty attached to the one at the old house; there's something about just checking in on the little guys every day that smooths out the spiky bits in your brain. Additionally, it'll be nice having herbs only a few steps away from the kitchen.

And this is only the beginning! We've got lots of space around the house and plan on putting most of it "to work" in one way or another(Nate's got ideas, make no mistake). It'll be a long process, but a highly enjoyable one, I predict.


-AKC