Welcome...

Welcome to my blog about gardening!

My family and I have recently moved to property (five acres) and I have been assigned to the garden. I wanted to journal the whole gardening process for my own benefit so I can refer back to see what works and what doesn't. I realized I might get more benefit if I could get input from others smarter than I am at the same time as share my experiences so others could learn from my mistakes... so I started this blog. I have a two week spring break, so I'll try my best to show my work over the next two weeks. After that, I'll be back in school for ten weeks before summer, so posts might be few and far between. I'll start posting regularly in the summer again since I won't be taking summer classes.

So to get myself started, I have been doing a good amount of reading on organic gardening techniques. I am going to try to keep things as organic as possible in the garden.

My library of books includes six excellent books:

- Organic Gardening by Geoff Hamilton

- The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler

- The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith

- The Backyard Orchardist by Stella Otto

- The Backyard Berry Book by Stella Otto

- The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control by Barbara W. Ellis and Fern Marshall Bradley

The first three are very similar, but they are thorough and give different details that the others don't give. I recommend them all!

Wanting to start out small (you know, kinda get the hang of things), we carefully shopped and ended up with the following vegetation to put in our garden:

Vegetables:

- Roma tomatoes

- Provider Beans

- Nantindo Carrot

- Red Weathersfield Onion

- Yellow Ebenezer Onion

- White Ebenezer Onion

- Super Sugar Snap Pea

- Broccoli

- Red Sails Lettuce

- Buttercrunch Lettuce

- Cimmaron Lettuce

- Samish Spinach

- Luscious Sweet Corn

- Alliance Pepper

- Elite Squash Zucchini

- Multipik Squash

- Raider Cucumber

- Parsnip

- Kale

- Beets

Herbs:

- Caesar Basil

- Santo Cilantro

- Vera Lavender

- Vulgare Oregano

- Plain Italian Dark Green Parsley

- Winter Thyme

- Chives

- Lemon Balm

- Chamomile

- Mint

Fruit:

- Pear

- Plum

- Peach

- Apple

- Fig

- Cherry

- Cantaloupe

- Grapes

Berries:

- Strawberries

- Raspberries

- Blueberries

Flowers:

- Marigolds

- Zinnias

- Nasturtiums

- Violas

So we don't overwhelm ourselves, we saved pumkins, garlic, leeks, potatoes and geraniums for next year. I didn't put the varieties of the fruits and berries down because I was too lazy to go to the garage and write them all down. Most of them we bought in several varieties. Should keep us busy for a while. Most of the fruits/berries we got at Costco. Most of the vegetable seeds we got at Harris Seeds. We didn't have much of a choice when it came to vegetable seeds since we bought the seeds late in February and a lot of what we wanted was on back order at other places. (Note to self: buy earlier; December probably isn't too early to start shopping.) I'll probably do a bit more price comparing next season.

This past Saturday, the fun began. We had some friends from church over and they helped us till our garden. I'll get some pictures up of the whole process, soon!