Inspiration: Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

While we wait for rain, sunshine and love to get our veggie garden growing, we decided to take a trip to Mount Vernon, Washington and see the rainbow of colors at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.

The colors are simply breathtaking! Acres of tulip fields in every color of the rainbow. The girls also loved putting on their rainboots and splashing in the muddy puddles.

It was difficult for each of us to decide which was our favorite blooms!

In the end, a muddy good time was had by all! And we got to take home a bouquet of freshly cut tulips, to remember our day.

Addendum: 8 years ago this spring, on my first visit to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. My how time flies!! This photo was taken before James and our two beautiful girls arrived in my life - how lucky I am indeed!

Learning on the Grow

So far this blog has been a way to record our two summer goals: doing an outdoor activity as a family and helping the girls learn to love their veggies.

In the process, there has been a lot of on-line learning for Mum and Dad.

Firstly, how best to create a garden that little hands will want to participate in and enjoy. We are hoping to create some happy memories and an annual activity.

Secondly, we learned what some of the common issues are in planning any garden layout:  sunlight, soil conditions and knowing which plants like being side by side. Who knew that plants had friends and enemies amongst other plants, not just insects! The most popular companion planting is apparently called the three sisters: which means planting corn, beans and squash together. From what I can tell, we seem to have gotten pretty lucky in our planting arrangement although we will have to see if the beans and tomatoes can play nicely while they are planted beside each other!

After lots of of browsing, the two links below turned out to be the most useful:

Building a kids veggie garden:
http://www.growingraw.com/vegetable-gardens-for-kids.html

Companion planting:
http://www.no-dig-vegetablegarden.com/companion-planting.html

Despite our inexperience, the garden does seem to be doing well. We are eagerly awaiting our seedlings to poke their little heads out of the earth.  Here is the most recent update.

I also couldn't resist the temptation to add a little beauty and bought a miniature rose standard named Kordana :-)

Home Depot (Again!) and a Ladybug

Another trip to the Home Depot to get more planter boxes for the pumpkins and herbs.

And apparently some decorative objects to "make our veggies happy".  If it keeps out kids interested in the veggie garden, I am happy to support it, but my gardening aesthetics are shuddering.....

We came back, and started the germination process for our cucumber seeds, planted our pumpkin seeds, and planted the rest of our veggie seedlings.

Then the girls decided they wanted to start "cooking" with our veggies and started searching the yard for leaves and flowers to make "veggie soup" for dinner.

Finally, we were all cleaned up and ready to go inside when we saw a ladybug land on our bean leaves. How auspicious! Hopefully this means good things are on the way for our garden :-)

Planted, seeded, watered and ...wormed?

After the last few shovels of dirt the veggie box was ready to plant.
The girls were very excited to get started!

We planted seedlings of peas, beans, beets, lettuce and strawberries.

Next we planted our carrots. 

It's not time for cucumbers or tomatoes yet, so we left some space.
Next we watered all the plants very carefully.

Finally we went on a worm hunt, and carefully added the worms to our garden.

At last we were finished. Time to sit back and grow.
The only question is, where do we plant all the herbs and pumpkin seeds that we ran out of room for??