Spring is here!

Its May and we are well into this bipolar season here in Oregon. A week or so ago it was approaching 90 degrees and my poor husband was outside laboring in the heat. Today? Well today it is raining and probably about 55 degrees out and the Hubby is sporting full rain gear. This is the time of year where it seems many of my hobbies overlap. Some days if I feel like being creative I can go outside and plant, take pictures of my children playing in the sun looking super adorable in their sunglasses and such. Other days like today I am forced to stick to the indoor activities...or I just feel blah because the sky was blue and gorgeous yesterday and today its just gray. Anywho- this time of year gardening is usually front and center. I love gardening. I don't love the weeding but I do enjoy the planting, the automatic watering my Hubs set up for me and I really love enjoying a salad made from home grown lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers. In years past I haven't done much record keeping nor have I planned things out very well. This year since my kids are older and my husband more involved things are going to be different! I thought I would share with you my gardening journey this year, hopefully it will give you some ideas of real life gardening by someone who is busy, a little lazy and lives in an area that is not always the easiest to garden. To start we had to weed the garden and get rid of all the stuff from the fall that I was supposed to take care of months ago. After this my garden beds were covered with a black plastic as it was too soon to plant anything. We weeded again and rototilled in some compost material that we purchased at Lane Forest Products. About a month later I had to go weed again as these little bitty bastard weeds were attempting to take over my raised beds. It took me hours to do this and I was shocked at just how many of the little buggers there were. In the past I have planted many things. Broccoli, cauliflower, celery, potatoes, strawberries, raspberries, herbs, beans, carrots peppers, pumpkin, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes (of different kinds) lettuce, spinach and onions. Sure, I have a pretty big garden and it fits fine-but not the best for me and my family in all honesty. I was attracted to the fact that I could say I grew all these things when most of the time they went rotten or were thrown to the birds. This year I have decided to really focus on the foods my family eats in particular the food that is spendy to pick up at my local grcery store and/or is just way better tasting if grown in the garden. So I am left with tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and raspberries. Our strawberries usually don't perform as well as I would like for how much space they take up and more often than not you are picking a few berries every so often instead of being able to pick a whole bunch to use in a smoothie or something so this year I decided no strawberries-I'll get them from a farm. Picked for me by the way. I also decided to get carrot and sunflower seeds. My kids always look forward to checking and digging up carrots and they were excited to hear that they might be seeing some giant flowers growing in the garden. I also picked up a couple of onion sets-I already have chives but my family Loves Walla Walla sweets so we will see how well they grow for us. I have picked up a mix of seeds and plants. In seed form I have carrots, Lettuce (3 different kinds), carrots, bush beans and sunflowers. AS plants I have several tomato species-focusing on cherry and grape versions, onion, cucumbers and I grabbed some lettuce and beans to give me a more steady flow of those plants. As for supplies I will hold off on cages and trellises for now, but I do plan on getting them for the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers. I plan on using painted stones (an art project for my kids) as labels for the seeds. I also ordered Wall-O-Waters for my tomatoes. I bought one pack which comes with 3 of them and I got the red ones instead of the green as the reviews seem to suggest that tomatoes did better with those. Thanks to Amazon Prime mine will be getting her in 2 days, no shipping charge, which means I get to avoid driving into town and most likely buying other things that I don't need. I hope to keep things updated as to how things are growing and whether or not the Wall-O-Waters work wonders or not. Later on I will include the species of each veggie I purchased and let y'all know if they were worth growing! Happy Gardening!!