I love to garden. And the older I get the more I enjoy not just growing good food to eat, but good food to preserve for my family to eat even in the winter time. Gardening has not just become a hobby, but a way to make our food without a lot of work and I know exactly what it was put into it. We don’t use any chemicals on our garden. Always a rule.
We use dirt we get at our local dump. We add dirt into the garden boxes every few years. It’s cheap and healthy. Then we like to also add mulch at the end of the season, as well as used coffee grounds, and if you have chicken poop, that’s good too. Stir it all together in the fall and your dirt will be ready to plant in the spring.
Plan the garden together. Buy your seeds. Choose some fun things to grow, as well as necessities.
Then be sure to plant tomatoes, onions, peppers.
I love to plant marigolds around my tomatoes, to keep the bugs away, and to help with pollination. Be sure to plant some flowers that attract bees. Lavender, flowering sage, marigolds, and I love miniature or dwarf sunflowers.
Make sure you have plenty of sun, and evening shade for the plants to cool down. We just used scrap wood to build some boxes. If you don’t have a space dedicated to a garden, you can garden in pots. Make sure your dirt is healthy, and the plants won’t dry out to easily. Mix your herbs into your flower pots too.
Tomatoes, onions, peppers, green beans, cucumbers, dwarf sunflowers, swiss chard, lettuce, spinach, zucchini, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, strawberries.
Here’s some of our favorite recipes we make during the growing season.