My Fruitful Life: 2016 Spring Garden

Square foot garden

We are hobby gardeners. By hobby, I mean, we really enjoy gardening but don't produce enough to feed our family throughout the year and spend more on gardening than it would cost to purchase organic food from the store. However, it's a great learning experience and we're learning as a family how to grow things organically. As part of our homeschooling, I decided that this year, we will weigh what we harvest. This way we can keep track of how much food we're producing and get an idea of how our garden is growing and feeding our family. I'm not including the cost of seeds since most of them we either saved or bought in the past. Not to mention, seeds are pretty cheap. I also didn't include the cost of soil or any gardening supplies. My goal is to grow 25 lbs this year. At the end of the year, we'll compare the cost of organic food from the store with the cost of organic food we've grown in our garden. In the future I hope to add more details about our garden such as how long each crop took to grow, the total cost involved, and how much time daily we spent watering the garden and taking care of it. But to start, weighing the crops is enough. I was excited to finally justify the cost of a kitchen scale.

We harvested our first crops a few weeks ago and some more earlier this week. So far, we have harvested carrots and onions and are just over 4.5 lbs. If our pumpkins, cantaloupes, and watermelon grow, we might make our goal before the Fall harvest. We have harvested some kale but I didn't weigh it. We should be getting some tomatoes as well. Our tomato plant is a great example of how my husband planted an organic tomato that we got from the store, in a pot of soil. The seeds have grown and produced lovely tomato plants that have been very fruitful the past few years.

This year, we added a two barrel compost. That along with the compost tube from our Garden Tower should really help our soil naturally. Here are some pictures of our garden. I'll start with some pictures of my family, since I know that's what my family enjoys seeing the most. Scroll down and you'll see pictures of our garden and gardening supplies. We're growing a lot of things. The Garden Tower mostly has herbs, strawberries, and greens. The square foot has pumpkins, onions, cantaloupes, peas, and potatoes. Our tomato plant is in the pot in front of our square foot. Depending on how this year goes, we may expand our garden next year. We'd love eventually become more self sufficient. On a side note, we have not had to run our sprinklers this Spring yet. Thankfully we've gotten some good rain and we've been able to use the rain from our rain barrels to water our garden, which is the best kind of water to use. Plants love rain water.