Gardening!

Recently, Wesley has been asking a lot about plants and how things grow, so we decided to throw our hats into the gardening ring and plant a garden of our own.  If you know our house, you know we don't have a yard, but we have a neighbor with a side yard that wasn't being used, so she said we could plant our garden there.  Here are the pictures of our gardening project:

The first step in planting a garden is a trip to Home Depot to purchase a new shovel.  And a few other things like wood and nails to build the planter boxes, but Wes was definitely most excited about the shovel. 

The next step is building the planter boxes, which requires some measuring... 

...and some drilling... 

...and some leveling.  Pictures of the completed planter boxes later.

The next step requires some plant purchasing.  Our friend Nadine told us of a plant sale to support a local library in their area, so we headed to Long Beach one Saturday morning to pick the fruits and vegetables we wanted to grow.  Here's Wes picking a tomato plant...

...and of course, his favorite, strawberries.  The complete list of what we planted a little later.

Next up, filling the completed planter boxes with soil.

Here's Wes with his prized shovel getting ready to plant!

The next step is to get these plants in the ground!

Michael said Wes had to have this red tomato cage when he saw it at Home Depot.  Red is his favorite color.

Wes liked the planting, but he was really into these giant rocks they dug out of our plot.  (He also loves volcanoes right now, so there were lots of pretend eruptions going on!)

Now that the plants are in the ground, they needed a good watering.

And here's our completed garden!  Prayerfully it will produce something edible!

Here's what we planted:

                                         Pineapple Tomato, Two more tomato plants, Several Red and Green Bell Peppers, Onions, Italian Roasting Peppers                                             

                                           Butternut Squash                        Zucchini

                                           Strawberries  

And the last and most fun part of planting a garden...making mud!  After watering the beds and cleaning up all our spilled dirt, there was quite a mud puddle for Wes to jump in.  He still is asking to make more mud!  My friends who have a few seasons of gardening under there belts say there is a learning curve when it comes to growing edibles, but we have had fun so far and hopefully Wes is learning something about where food comes from.  Keep you posted on our progress!