Friday, February 6, 2009

Gardening has begun!

Just on a smaller scale than I had previously eluded to. Yesterday we received our first gardening project in the mail, and its amazing because we can grow it in the house. Broccoli sprouts from the Sprout People! I'm not sure if you ever buy these at the grocery store, but we love putting them on sandwiches and salads. They are so healthy and good for you! But, they aren't all that cheap. So, we found this wonderful little kit when I was reading maya*made's blog last week. If you're looking for something to do with the kids then you might want to invest in one of their sprouting kits...talk about a deliciously fun science experiment! And check out the huge bag of seeds we got... we'll be rolling in sprouts for months!!!

I had to show the packing peanuts that the Sprout People used...they are totally biodegradable! We even wet them a little to watch them begin to disentigrate.
It was very cool to see!

Hubby and I are a bit short on time this weekend (and for the next several weekends) so we've reevaluated our original Gardening 101 plans... he has some major web design projects to complete (asap), and I'm all kinds of anxious about planting a regular tilled garden or a raised bed type of garden. First off, our yard isn't the biggest in the world. While analyzing where to put the garden we realized the spots that receive enough sun for optimum growing are quite sloped so we are having a tough time picking where to plant.

Another issue is tilling a garden close to the house. Since we would be watering more and making the soil a bit softer I'm wondering if this will create potential ground shifting issues that could impact our concrete slab and ruin our foundation. The ground slopes downwards from our slab to help with drainage, so if we make that ground flatter we could be creating little pools for water that won't drain. (Maybe I'm just being paranoid.)

Then there's the issue of the raised bed... build our own or buy one. There are some great raised beds already built that we could buy, but it's truly more than what we would like to spend. Even once we settled on just building our own, we were back to the issue of location and the slope in the yard vs. too much shade.

Tomorrow I'm going to just look for some containers and see if we can't make a container garden instead of the other kind. I'm a little bummed about not having a full-fledged garden, but hey... I don't have the greenest of thumbs, so maybe this is the most realistic option anyway. More pics and updates to come... I soooo want this to work!!!