Gardening made easier this year

my garden boxes

I am not a gardner! I hate to weed the garden. I have young children who tend to destroy the garden while trying to help. There are many reasons I hate to garden, but I want my children to learn about their food. I want to teach them to work. I want to be self sufficient. There are many good reasons to learn to garden. I want these things, but I get so frustrated by children, animals, and weeds that I just want to pull my hair out.

Last year was just a bad year in general for many people in the area.  It was our first garden in our new home. We did not enrich the soil, and the list goes on about why it was bad.  Taking all these things into consideration and making a plan to overcome We will triumph. I am working toward creating a simple garden that works for us. 

Grow boxes seem to be the thing for us this year I was able to create my boxes from scrap wood that my husband picked up for free. (Love freecycle but that is a story for another time).  I took some of the split and broken pieces  and created four garden boxes. We lined them with newspapers and a layer of leaves from the fall cleanup.  A few inches of dirt mixed with a good mulch lined the top and we were ready to go.





my girls were great helpers moving the dirt with the dump trucks




Filling the boxes up

  

My top three reasons for building boxes to grow my garden this year



1. Makes it look like I know what I am doing

2. Less weeds!

3. I can tell where the plants are supposed to be growing


In the past we have had a weed patch with a few garden items growing alongside the weeds. I am always unsure about what is a weed and what is a plant to keep. By the time I figure it out, that weeds are so big and out of control they seem so overwhelming. I let the weeds grow and hope that the vegetables will grow also. Looking back it seems so silly, but at the time it seemed like a good plan.  As a busy overwhelmed mother the things we do make sense at the moment. As I have been able to simplify my life I am finding that I am less overwhelmed. Being less overwhelmed means less crisis living and better decision making skills.  I hope that I will have less crisis in the garden this year by eliminating the big trouble spots.

 Being able to tell where the plants are growing has been a frustration. We have marked the rows, but somehow the plants still get trompled. The dog and kids can't really tell where it is safe to walk (expecially while running).  Building the boxes has saved me that frustration this year.  The kids and I both know that the boxes are where the plants are supposed to be growing.  It is alot easier for the kids to see the boundries. They know that they do not dig or play in the boxes. Now if I can keep the robins and chickens from eating my seeds.

Last year many of the rows of seeds got trampled by the children and dog. Those seeds and plants that were not trampled were eaten up by robins.  I would see robins out there picking up things in the garden, not knowing that it was my seeds.  I went out looking for plants I looked, and looked for the tiny plants. "They should be growing here" I thought to myself. I then noticed that there was a nice neat row of tiny holes right along in the spot that I thought I would see vegetables poking up their heads. The robins had eaten my tiny plants.  I was so frustrated I wanted to give up gardening forever. 

I will keep gardening.  I may not be good at it, but when I have to survive off of what I can grow I will be glad that I learned how to grow something. I would rather have the learning curve happen now when there is an abundance of food rather than when it is critical with no food. So I may not like to garden, but I do it because I love my family and I want them to have the values and skills that come with this process. I think that is part of what I loved about my Grandparents. You can read an earlier post about my Grandma.  She is wonderful.  I am grateful fof her teachings and want to pass that on to my children. I want to leave a good legacy.  I don't want to leave the legacy of a stressed out mom.  So I will continue on with the process and journey called life.