2008 Garden: A Year in Review

So since I'm just starting this blog and the idea didn't really occur to me until recently, I didn't purposely take great pictures of the garden through the season, and a lot of the pictures I took were on my camera-phone and thus deleted and un-findable (Sorry, sunflowers!).

However, I was able to locate a lot of them, and put together a flickr slideshow of different spots of the garden through the 2008 season:



Our primary garden areas are as follows:
(Pictures are by group/area, with progression through the season, first pictures are from mid-April, last ones are from early November)

* 2 4x10 raised bed boxes for vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers, beans, peas) and bushels with herbs
* Back fence with muskmelon and watermelon vines
* Along the side of the garage - honeysuckle, violets, and mini-roses
* Fence by the garage - in the yard - raspberries and mint
* Side fence - Sunflowers, strawberry patch, butterfly garden, cherry tree
* Fence - outside of the yard - Miscellaneous flowers

Soon, I'm going to post our goals and what we'd like to do with the garden for 2009.

Thanks for reading!

Another day, another blog

I've found that keeping a blog is an easy way for me to stay on task with various goals and to-do lists. It is also a great way to gauge the progression of projects - household things, kids growing up, etc.

This past summer I dedicated a lot more time to our small family garden than I had in previous years, and I want to document the progress of a full season. My goal with this blog is to track what I've done to prepare the plot, what we plant, when it grows, what we harvest, and what works for us.

I've been stalking a lot of local garden blogs, and love gleaning ideas from them, so I'm hoping that some of our family's ideas and activities will help someone else who is just venturing into gardening.

I finally get why gardeners are passionate about their gardens...There is something so fulfilling when you look outside all summer long and see fresh vegetables and fruits that you can pluck and eat, or can and enjoy through the fall and winter, or share with neighbors and family. I think it is wonderful for our kids to see how things grow, to see butterflies congregating in our mini-butterfly garden, and to watch our baby cherry tree grow and grow (Can't wait for fruit from that!!). Mind you, there's also the defeat of yielding 3 strawberries all season, and zero raspberries after the dog made the raspberry zone her napping area, and the time I thought we had a ton of beans growing, but it was some kind of weed. Oops.

Anyway, it's all a learning process, and a fun one at that. I hope to encourage everyone to plant something, anything, in their space. Herbs or tomatoes, peppers or flowers, you can do it!

PS The blog title "Our food is fighting!" comes from a WWII poster to encourage people to plant Victory Gardens. Like many people, I've romanticized, in my mind, the sacrifices that citizens made during the Great War, and I feel that enjoying the fruit of your own labor (and going a whole summer without buying any vegetables at the grocery store!) is incredibly satisfying.