Gardening Adventures

This summer we (as in the kids and I) have found ourselves spending quite a bit of time in the dirt. Once a week we go to McIver to meet up with some friends and tend to the garden there:

Here is what the students planted before they left for the summer. We have tried our best to keep everything alive and considering that I for one have no experience, I think we've done a good job! On Fridays, I take my group from the Autism Society over to work on the garden and then we take our harvest by the local food bank. There is always at least a full grocery bag or three to donate.

I finally took my camera this last Tuesday to take some pictures of the kids in the garden because they are precious, but made the mistake of waiting until we were about done before taking any pictures. Skylar had gotten soaked with the hose and thereby stripped nekked, so I couldn't very well take pictures of her then. Jane, who met us for breakfast and gardening, laughed and told me to drive extra carefully home so as not to get into a wreck.

Grey is a huge (?) help in the garden. Or else he will be when he learns the difference between leaves and grass. He loves to help weed, but tends to grab the nice green leaves off the plants and tear them before throwing them out of the garden.

And when we do pick some veggies? He does this:

We have to hide the tomatoes.

So, I've been inspired to take a risk and work on my own gardening at home and was especially excited a few weeks ago to go to The Christmas Tree shop and find all of their plants on sale. We got all kinds of things from tomatoes, to strawberries, to wildflowers and some hanging pots all for about $10.

Skylar and Grey helped me plant everything and have helped water them too. The other day it was time to transplant some of our little growers into bigger pots and they, ahem, were a big help then too. Ken helped, so I had a chance to grab some pictures without the fear of Grey destroying everything we did while I was busy. Oh wait, that fear was still there.

There aren't any pictures of Skylar here because she wanted to take pictures instead of be in them. So she zoomed around the porch in her little flinstone-like car and took a few pictures of Grey. Meanwhile Grey was busy digging in the dirt.

We used their picnic table as our potting area. It was a good height for them actually and worked better than the front yard which we used the first go round.

Grey loves these little shovels and rakes.

Here is some of our work from the day. The larger plant is one from my classroom that survived the school year. He got replanted in the teapot since he needed some more room. The smaller one is one of our pumpkin plants.

Here is the other pumpkin plant. Two of four of them have made it and I don't think the other two seeds are going to hatch. Although we will keep trying. These two have grown about twice the size in the last week since we replanted them!

This is where they started and where the other two seeds still are.

Here are our strawberry plants. They haven't shown anything yet and I'm not sure they will since I believe it is past season.

Grey might or might not have eaten some of the dirt as he was rearranging things.

I moved the finished plants up to the top railing to try to save them from his incessant digging and he climbed on his table to try to reach them.

Here are some of the wildflowers we planted on the front porch.

Only one of them has sprouted anything, and I'm not sure if they are getting enough sun under the porch… might have to move them out to another location.

Here is another pot with wildflowers in it. Just started to come up.

And here is our cherry tomato plant. Looking pretty good!

And around the yard. We have quite a bit of landscaping around our yard: its obvious the previous owners were big into gardening. Its been fun to see what pops up during different times of the year and it seems there is always some new flowers blooming throughout spring and summer.

Here are the butterfly plants. I'm sure I could find the name of them if I searched, but what I do know is that they attract tons of butterflies when they bloom.

Here is my hydrangea bush. It is usually a vibrant blue/purple, but its been excessively hot lately with little rain, so its died down some.

These beauties are blooming on the right side of the front proch.

While these are blooming on the left side.

Last year I went through and took several macro photos of all the different colored flowers in our yard and they now decorate our kitchen. Makes it feel much brighter and prettier!