Gardening

 For Mother's Day this year, Chris built me 2 raised garden beds.  He spent a Saturday off measuring and cutting under the watchful eye of Nathan.  

 The results were these 2 beauties! We bought a big green bag of dirt but that wasn't quite enough to fill them.  So Chris used the tractor and scooped up some manure rich dirt from the back pasture and dumped it in each box.

 I bought some cucumber, pepper and tomato plants at Costco to plant in one bed.  In the second bed I planted corn, beans and peas from seed.  It was so fun to see the little sprouts popping out of the ground after only a few days!

 I planted everything way too close together (I wanted to squeeze in as much as possible).  In the end I pulled out some of the corn and all of the peas to make some space.

 With our dry summer weather, I spent several evenings carrying pails of water from the barn to water the garden.  We don't have a hose or spot to hook one up around our house so I got lots of exercise lugging my watering can and a large pail from the barn.

 My cucumbers did amazing and I made 2 batches of dill pickles and 2 batches of bread & butter pickles.  The peppers, with the exception of 1, all rotted on the plant :(  The corn looked very promising but in the end, there are many tiny cobs that don't seem to want to grow any bigger.  The beans did pretty well, although I was hoping for more.  We usually eat one meal a week of fresh beans and I was able to freeze 2 meals worth.

 When I bought the tomato plants, I didn't look too closely at the tag.  I was hoping for beef-stakes but ended up with tiny tims.  I have had oodles of them and have been giving them away to friends and neighbours to enjoy.