Spring is in the Air!

Spring has officially arrived, at least according to the calendar.  We've been surprised that even here in North Carolina winter proved herself formidable.  These days, we are alternating temperatures between low-30's and wet and mid-70's and sunny!  We are all ready for the warm weather to settle in.

The good news is that we've been able to make a decent amount of progress on our garden.  We plan to move to a different house mid-summer so it seemed that the only way not to miss out on the gardening season entirely was to make our garden portable!  Handy as ever, Brian built us a couple of beautiful garden boxes on wheels.  They are 3'x4' and we hope they will allow for a fair bit of home-grown produce this summer since we are utilizing the square foot gardening method.  At the very least, we will have a fun "pet" to take care of (Kate: Mom, can I have a pet fish?  Me: Your pet is our garden!) and we will learn a lot.

This past weekend we finished preparing our boxes.  Brian added a bit of additional height to them and the girls dug up worms from the yard and added them in.  I'm not really sure whether that was necessary, but it seemed like a good idea at the time and they certainly enjoyed doing it!  Brian added grids (because what's a square foot garden without visible grids?!) and Kate and I planted the first few squares with sugar snap peas and two varieties of lettuce.  Next weekend we hope to build the trellises for our peas, pole beans, and pickling cucumbers.

 This morning the girls filled up some little cups with soil so that we could bring them inside to warm up and start some tomatoes.  We are quite late to be starting tomatoes, but hope that since the growing season is longer here we'll be okay.  We're winging it!

The garden boxes, basking in the morning sun!