Bag Garden

I am finished with school for the semester and I now feel like I can properly tend to my garden (and blog). Hooray! Since I'm brand new at the whole veggie garden thing, my timing was definitely horrendous, considering I had no seedlings going until two or three weeks ago. And even now, it's just tomatoes. 4 out of the 8 are looking good, though, so I obviously rock at growing stuff. I was planning on starting my cucumbers this past weekend, but since I scored a good deal on a dresser for my daughter on CraigsList, I spent the weekend sanding it down and getting a coat of paint on it. I like to think that by purchasing said dresser, I saved it from going in a landfill. Really, I just kept it from ending up in someone else's house, because that thing was beautiful and someone else would have snagged it if I wasn't a daily CL stalker.

So my "Easy Care Bag Garden" is all set up. It was touch and go for a while because of a mulch situation. Basically, we decided to mulch all around the bags with rubber mulch to be "eco-friendly." I mean, it says on the bags that it's eco-friendly, so it must be the smartest solution, amirite? It turns out that even though it saves tires from going into the landfill, you're now using TIRES to surround the vegetables you and your children are going to eat. TIRES! I'm not trying to eat the chemicals used to make tires. So my poor husband spent just as much time picking it all up as he did putting it all down. I must say, it looked gorgeous, but now it's just all in bags next to our shed. It was already purchased and it wasn't cheap, so we are thinking that the compromise will be to just use it as a decorative "patio" type area with some Adirondack chairs and planters. That way, there's nothing growing there that can be contaminated. We couldn't decide what to do instead around the garden bags, so I decided that instead of rushing into a decision, I'm going to just let it flow this summer and decide what I want to do for next year. We already plan on making raised garden beds for where each section of bags is. We'll decide if we want to surround the beds in grass or what.

I made my trellis for the peas, put in some stakes for the peppers, and the cages are all ready for my tomato seedlings if time would just fast forward. (Time, please don't really fast forward.) O planted all of the peas because she loves eating them and wanted to be a part of it.

To the left of the garden is a black garbage can. That's our current compost bin. We got the idea here and spent about $20 to get it done. So far, it's working great for us, but we definitely need at least one more, especially since our CSA delivery starts next week and we'll have even more produce scraps.