Little Garden Girl

Caroline looking pretty dirty at the garden tonight!

We participated in a "weeding party" at the garden to get the common areas more under control. Tonight we primarily weeded in the kids' garden. We earned work-share hours and we got extra tonight since Grandma came along to help!

A fun trip to the garden...

Just an update, our garden is doing extremely well!
Caleb has been keeping an eye on our pepper plants and he'd been wanting to pick a green pepper- the pepper had already grown quite large, especially in comparison to how small the actual pepper plant was. So we told him HE could pick it when we brought our friends from out of town to the garden...tonight was the night!

Even though he doesn't look thrilled in this pic, he was really excited! Our first garden pepper! Its smells so good~

Tonight our friends from ND are passing through and so we brought them out to show them our garden.
We remembered that they were the family we did our 1st garden with in ND 2 summers ago!
Here are all the kids- Caleb, Caroline, Ingrid, Joshua, & Ilsa!

Delivering hay to the Garden

Today we had to deliver a load of hay to the garden. After that, Caleb helped me water and harvest some lettuce. We already have more than we can eat!

This was a really busy day because we wanted to get to the garden and our farm to pick up our vegetables as well as having a pancake breakfast at the farm, and today our helper, Betsy, wasn't able to make it. So we just took a little longer getting around - but we still had fun. Here we are with our trailer full of hay.

Something like this just HAS to be played in!

Poshy didn't want to miss out on this!

Greens, greens, and more greens!

Here's are the signs from our CSA on what to pick up today. You can see we got a good deal of food for this early in the season.

Below is a combination of what we got from our CSA and what we harvested from our garden. We got about 6 bags of lettuce and a bag of spinach from the garden, and the signs above explain what we got this week from our CSA. It's coming out our ears, but it's so fun to get food straight from the ground, and it's easy to find people willing to share in the bounty!

An abundance already!

Mommy is gone this week to help our friend in Texas, so Dad and the kids are staying busy. Tonight, we went to the garden to water and we decided it's time for some pictures. God is blessing our garden!


Here's my super-cute helper with our abundant lettuce crop! You can see part of our peas on the right side- we didn't plant them on St Patrick's Day as the wisdom says, so we'll see how well they do with this heat. Caleb filled up on fresh strawberries from the kids plot tonight - just washed 'em and ate 'em before they even knew they weren't connected to the plant anymore! We love this natural-ness. Everyone should eat food fresh from the ground now & then.

Caleb between our row of tomatoes and our row that has lettuce (3 kinds), peas, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, and strawberries.

I handed the camera over to my helper to take a picture of the corn. It's doing great!

Here are our 3 lettuce rows - red leaf on the left, buttercrunch in the middle, and romaine on the right. We also participate in a community supported agriculture program, which means we pick up fresh produce from a farm - whatever is in season - each Saturday all summer. Between this and the garden, we've got lots of greens to eat and plenty to give away.

This is our spinach, broccoli, and cauliflower. The broccoli plants are getting huge! Last time we gardened in ND, the broccoli got eaten up before it even got this big. Maybe we'll get some this time.

We planted another partial row of our 3 kinds of lettuce. It's time to thin out the starts and have a salad of baby greens.

Mom's sunflowers - they're doing well, too!

Since Mom and the kids like pickles (hey, Dad has come a long way since childhood, but still no pickles for him), so we have 4 mounds of cucumbers. I just thinned these out tonight to 4 plants per mound - they're all doing great. We continue to pray that God will bless our garden - we are thrilled with it, the kids learn so much from it, and it's a wonderful place to spend our time together as a family.

Hard workers

Joshua the manly man working with the sprayer...

This kept him busy for quite some time

Caroline helping Daddy build our own trellis for the peas to start climbing

She was a good little helper