Growing a Garden

On the LDS Provident Living page it says:

“Self-reliance is a product of our work and undergirds all other welfare practices. It is an essential element in our spiritual as well as our temporal well-being.”
—Thomas S. Monson

Planting a garden, even a small one, allows for a greater degree of self-reliance. With the right information and a little practice, individuals and entire families can enjoy the many benefits of planting and tending a garden.

If you have been following my blog for awhile you know I love to Garden. Last year I discovered Square foot Gardening and fell in love with the concept. I couldn't follow all the guidelines. Just due to lack of time and money. (Our garden plot was way too big). So I decided to use the same concept in our already existing garden plot. It didn't work. One because weeds took over faster than I could remove them and two, we did not have a very nice summer. Sadly we had no harvest last year. I will not let that stop me from trying Again.

Square foot Gardening, take two. We bought The materials to build a 4x4 box. It won't be enough to sustain us. But we'll have fun eating what does grow and teaching Cameron in the process. There was another glitch. Finding the right ingredients for the soil mixture. I would ask the workers in the various garden centres if they had Vermiculite and the looked at me like I was from mars. So we made an executive decision then and there. Instead of driving around to more stores (the count was now at four) we would just make up our own soil mixture. We would still have the raised box and still plant the numbers in each square foot that Mel suggests. So 2 out 3 can't be that bad, right? We shall see I guess. At least we'll have fun in the meantime.

That was Friday Night. Saturday morning we built the Garden. Cameron helped of course.

Holding the nails for Daddy

Making sure the Box doesn't go anywhere

Putting the Weed Carpet on

Adding and mixing the Soil

Making the Square foot grid

Saturday, although a nice sunny day was a bit too windy so we decided to wait for Monday to plant and make it our Family Home Evening Activity. We use the Nursery Manual for our lessons each week. And for this one we decided to teach lesson 7: Jesus Christ created the world for me.

Planting was fun. Cameron was really into it. He loved taking the seeds out of the container and dropping them in the soil. And who doesn't love digging in dirt and mud? Maybe that's just me and that's where he gets it from.


(If you're wondering why our heads are cut off, Michael was in charge of pictures, these are the few that I thought still okay to keep, most of them didn't have our heads at all. He thought I wanted pictures of the planting. I was a bit upset at first. Why would I not want pictures of all of us? The whole purpose is to capture Cameron and his facial expressions. Now I just shake my head. There are just some things Daddies and Husbands don't get)

Anyways...

Pumpkins

Tomatoes

Getting topsoil to cover the seeds.

Peas

Digging the holes to plant the potatoes

Planting the potatoes

Carrots

Every time we look at our little Garden we are filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment. Cameron looks at it and says "garden", he knows he had a part in it. Now we anxiously await for the first sign of green.