So I said I wasn’t going to do a garden this year but I might have changed my mind. I love to garden but with 5 kiddos and life I have started the past two years with good intentions only to end with dried up dead plants and very healthy weeds. I had also decided this year that I was going to change the area that had been our garden into my bee hive garden which meant ripping out the raised beds. We got the raised beds tore out, now we just need to spread the dirt out and get the flower garden planted.
So I decided to do some container/pot gardens this year. I have a number of plants because I can’t keep house plants alive and I usually plant flowers in them for my porch anyway. So instead of flowers I went with veggies this year. And I decided to make it super easy because I have my hands full enough right now and got plants that were already established. I went to our local nursery last week and picked out a couple of cherry tomatoes (since that’s really all the kids want to eat) and some peppers and the plan was for broccoli. Plan being the key word. And I totally thought I had bought some little broccoli sprouts that were just a few weeks old (only 2 leaves) but as I got home and planted them turns out I ended up with 6 cabbage plants. Totally not what I was planning but whatever, we will eat a lot of coleslaw this fall I guess. And despite wandering all over the nursery and finding sprouts of every other kind of plant I could not find little pepper plants, the ones I found had a big sign on them that said “not for sale”. So I got some seeds. And it’s late enough that we might have actual peppers by late fall with the way my gardening luck goes.
On Wednesday I had just Paxton and Coppelia home with me in the afternoon and so they were my helpers. And as you can tell from the photos, clearly gardening is a dangerous sport at our house and so everyone wore bike helmets (well everyone under the age of 4 that is…)We filled up the pots with dirt from the old garden and then planted the new plants and also had to replant some of the herbs that I had for my indoor herb garden (post coming soon). They were quite the helpers and ultimately I decided to just give them both one of the dead herbs and some little pots to “plant”. They absolutely loved their dead plants and after planting them a few times in their pots they decided that they needed watered as well. And by watered I mean “drowned and excessively watered”. But I was able to plant the other plants while they did their dead plants.
Since it’s April in Colorado and we can have days of 75 and then the next day it not get above 30, I knew that my plants would be inside. Unfortunately when I attempted to move the first tomato plant inside the edge of the pot broke and the pot tipped over spilling my tomato plant all across the front porch. So I discovered that that is just how this year is going to go with my garden. I filled the pot back up and scooped up the plant and re-planted it. A few days out it still looks ok, so we’ll see.
Definitely not the usual garden that I have and way less than I usually plant and so far between getting cabbage instead of broccoli, not having baby pepper plants but starting with seeds this late and having a tomato plant attempt to escape, my expectations for this year are quite low…so I think that means if anything grows I’ll count it as a win for the year.
Hiking Mommy 