Fun Gardening
Small space gardening.
You can call it whatever you like. But I am kinda liking the title “Fun Garden”.
My mom was over recently and we were talking about all the things I am growing on our deck this year, a little of this and a little of that, when she said this is fun gardening. It isn’t taking up much space, providing some food and flowers and giving me a chance to get my hands in the dirt without having to chase (or have someone find) littles all over the yard.
Honestly I think the years that we rented and I grew tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in the flower bed along the side of our house was some of the first years of fun gardening for me. I got to play around and learn in a small space before we got into such a large garden. It gave me confidence in my ability to garden. Then when we got to our home and I had LOTS of room to garden I was ready for the full size garden.
This year I am doing an experiment. I am going to see how much I can grow on part of our deck.
We have an large deck so I am going to use just part of it to do this experiment.
I have 2 raised beds from last year. Here is the YouTube video showing how easy they were to put together.
This year in the raised beds I have one full of strawberries and the other I currently have broccoli, celery, cabbage, beets, radishes carrots, kohlrabi, lettuces, strawberry mint and chocolate mint.
Everything is doing really well in those boxes. Bo did have to reinforce the one bed. Over winter the bottom came apart, so this spring he added some stronger screws and a few bigger boards to hold the bottom together. I have some empty places I will be adding more seeds to this week. I might add a few beans just to see how they do in it.
The bed that has the strawberries is packed full. After the berries are finished I am going to be thinning them out. I just seen someone was putting their strawberries under some fruit trees to help as a ground cover. I think I will give that a try and see how well they do.
Bo brought a square and rectangle shaped wooden boxes home from work. The square one I have plants my father in law picked up for us. We have 3 kale and 1 broccoli plants in it. I have picked the kale a few times already and the broccoli is starting to form a head. Some of the kale I have cooked and some I have put in the freezer to use in soup this fall/winter.
The rectangle one I haven’t planted yet (I have to get more dirt). I think I am going to plant a tomato, some beans and an eggplant just to see how things grow.
The deck also has some beautiful flowers.
Flowers make the fun garden complete.
I grabbed the camera and recorded a video of our deck garden so you can see all that is growing!
I hope that showing you all what I have growing on our deck will encourage you to grow a little something this year. You might be surprised at how much fun you have while doing it.
I am going to challenge you to find a cute little space, whether its in a pot or two on your deck/patio/porch or a small space in your flower bed by your house to grow a “fun garden”. Send me pictures of your “fun garden”, I want to cheer you on as you grow something beautiful in fun way.