spring planting with the family reject gardener

There is a beautiful cottage garden growing in my head. Everything is a little messy looking – flowers and vegetables growing everywhere. No lines. No perfect symmetry. Just flowering goodness mixed with food to feed my family. I have books. Magazine pages torn out. Pinterest boards. And yet I just can’t seem to get my garden growing. It probably has something to do with growing kids and ridiculous amounts of time spent sweeping my floors and doing laundry. But someday…..

Each spring I get a little discouraged. At this point in the season, my sister and dad are already harvesting things. My grandparents were the same way. I’d ask grandpa, “when can I plant______?” His response was always, “you should have planted that last month.” And, thus is my life as the reject gardener in the family.

I decided to look back at some old garden pictures. To my surprise, looking back at old pictures reminded me that I actually have made some progress with my garden. How easy it is to forget.

This was 2 years ago.

And this was a year later (last year). My vegetables may not have been impressive, but those sunflowers sure were!

So here we are this year. A semi-blank slate. I might be the family reject gardener, but by standards outside of my extended family, I think we might have a pretty great garden this year.

Here are a few of my favorite books related to gardening. Only one is really a ‘gardening’ book. The others we use as part of our homeschool curriculum, but I highly recommend them.

Nature Anatomy ~ The Edible Garden

Our Year in the Garden Journal ~ Farm Anatomy

For years, I asked my grandpa, “When can I plant _______?”

Then, I started asking Lesley (my sister), “When can I plant _______?”

This year my friend Natalie gave me one of her gardening calendars for our region. Natalie, my sister thanks you.

The gardening journal is produced by a local non-profit. They asked for my input on it. It took me about .5 seconds to get super excited about it once I opened the first page. I so wanted to be able to share with you all how to order your own, but it is a small in-house production right now. Hopefully soon they will be ready to take larger orders. It looks like next week I can give you more information on pre-ordering one if you are interested. This will be our ‘science’ book for the rest of spring and summer!

As I was writing this post, I noticed his first answer. “What is a garden? Something you plant something in.” He did go into great detail creating a garden sign for us. Each letter is made up of vegetables. I’ll give him some grace on his garden description! Next week we’re going to make his garden sign design come to life!