It's Almost Here...!

I'm talking about SPRING of course, and I can't wait!

Along with spring comes gardening. I've been busy planning our spring garden. We have 3, 4x4 boxes and 1, 2x2 box. I felt pretty good about our garden last year with it being our first real garden, but I definitely want to improve.

My friend, Rene, and her family have a huge garden that feeds them (4 families!) all summer plus enough left over to get them through most of the winter. They also raise their own chickens. When it comes to gardening I have a lot to learn. Fortunately, I knew exactly who to go to for advice.

This past Wednesday a group of us went to buy seeds with Rene and her family. We went to a store a few towns away so we could get good seeds (heirloom). You can learn more about seeds on Rene's site here. I learned so much from just this one trip... I can't wait to get my hands dirty!!

I ended up buying broccoli, cabbage, peas, carrots, onions and 2 different kinds of lettuce.

I learned that you can plant certain types of flowers in your garden and they will help keep bugs away and/or attract the good kind of bugs. I will probably do this since I want our garden to be organic.

Everyone at this family owned store was very friendly. Here we were checking out the broccoli and cabbage plants, when this guy walked up and started telling us all about them. By the time he and Rene's mom were finished teaching us how to plant them and care for them I wanted to buy the whole table! But, after giving it some thought I decided against it.

Because this trip happened in the middle of our school day I wanted to make it count. I had to be creative, but found a way for it to be a field trip. I am so glad I did. It turned out to be a lot more than just a seed store. They had fresh produce, farming equipment, livestock supplies, gardening equipment/supplies and a few animals. I had the kids take their journals to draw pictures and take notes. Joshua was in charge of the camera and making sure to get good pictures for the blog. I think he succeeded. When we got home, Seth and Noah finished their journal entry, along with a few sentences about what they had learned.

Here are a few of the animals they had at the store...



These pigs look sooo cute...



too bad they grow up and get stinky!!



Chickens.



And then there was this cute guy...

I will probably work out in the garden this weekend. I can't wait! I'll try to get some pictures up as soon as possible.

Be sure and check out Rene's website for more on gardening. Her website is budgetsavingmom.com Then click on the "gardening" tab at the top of the page.