State of the Garden Address

We officially have a garden people! Most of our time this weekend was spent getting our garden ready. The beau and I debated on what to do about soil. Should we buy it all? Would that be expensive? So what we ended up doing was going to his uncle's in the country and doing it the hard (but free) way.

Ruby played in all the puddles and got very dirty, then jumped in the pond to clean off. She's never experienced so much nature!

And she got to meet the chickens! She could not figure out what those little creatures were...

This is how far we got Saturday before Jeffry had to go to work:

We decided where the beds were going to go, which was hard to do because our yard is VERY shady. We have 3 very large trees and the house so a lot of the day our yard is shaded, and the leaves aren't quite developed on the trees yet so it was hard to judge. Hopefully the spot we picked turns out ok. It does look nice with the beds at the end of the sidewalk to nowhere. We used all the dirt we got from Jeffry's uncles as a nice base, and we did end up buy and bag of topsoil to fill it in the rest of the way. 

We got a 64 qt. bag for $15 and it filled the beds nicely with a tiny bit left over. Our beds are 3'x5'. I like that this soil is supposed to help with over and under-watering since this is my first garden.

So that was Saturday, and Sunday I put some plants in. I started most of my plants by seed, but I did buy a few things. I bought a tomato plant, a cucumber (because I forgot I bought the seeds for them), mint (for that same reason) and onions. I started onions from seed even though I heard they were hard to grow. They did sprout so I was excited, but then they all got wilty and died. Boo. So I bought some young onion plants (which are called 'sets') and put those in yesterday too. My seedlings I have not put in the ground yet, but they did spend some time outside yesterday to help them get acclimated. I did put some seeds directly in the ground yesterday too. My herbs (basil, chives and thyme) and lettuce. Oh, and the plants I bought were like $3.50 each for anyone wondering. 

I also bought this guy for $9 since it is supposed to be for transplanted plants and that's what most of mine are.
Can't be too prepared!

Here is Spencer overseeing from the house:

And here is the state of our garden as of today:

Oh yeah I forgot to tell you about our little fence situation. We of course have squirrels, we have a woodchuck living under the neighbors shed and I know we have skunks in the neighborhood, so I wanted to protect our plants from them. The stakes were $4 for 12, and the chicken wire was I think like $12 and its 2'x25', though we are a tiny bit short. I don't know if we are going to get a whole new roll for just that little bit we might try and figure something else out, but I for sure do not want any little rodent mouths on my little seedlings.

This week is supposed to be really nice, high of 70 or so every day with only a few sprinkles here and there. Perfect for new plants! So I want to try and get the plants I started from seed in the ground in the next few days. I still have bell pepper, hot pepper, beets and carrots to go in!

OH!! I almost forgot I made these too:

Super simple and self explainatory. And a 50% off JoAnn's coupon to boot :)