Hellobee

I am a daughter of a farmer, I grew up on a 25 acre plot of oranges and olives, so being outdoors and growing food are mostly in my blood. Through all these years, even though I have a lot of knowledge and feel very at home with the concept of growing food, I still have never mastered growing my own garden. The climate I am originally from has a lot to do with this; it was extremely dry and hot for most of the year so it is very easy to kill plants of any kind. Having recently moved to the coast of California, we are now in a more mediterranean climate that is mild, which to me means gardening is finally a possibility. I have to be honest there are days I miss watering because I am just too busy. That never worked in a climate that gets 6 months of near 100 degrees, but here it’s much more forgiving.

I signed the girls up for a gardening class this Summer that is really so amazing. It has taught me a lot about gardening and how it is possible even for busy moms of little kids. I think the key I learned was to start really small. A friend of mine and I designed some simple trough-style planters from plywood. We made them approximately 2’hx4’lx1’w. In the bottom we drilled multiple large holes for drainage. Before filling it with organic potting soil, we raised them slightly on stepping stones. After we added the potting soil we simply soaked the plants in some vitamin B and water mixture for about 20 minutes and planted them, with a bit of spacing throughout the trough.

Summer in gardening class

This idea is really simple and I am happy to say, it is working! We’ve created a small gardening space on one side of our house that gets mostly full sun all day, and we added a garage sale dining table which we made into a little work table and some plastic garden tools for the kids. Mostly, we needed watering cans or plastic buckets.

Tonight we harvested our first crop! It has been truly an amazing experience for our whole family to grow our own food. The girls love to check the plants and water them, but they also like to play for long periods of time right in the garden space. I’ve learned that it doesn’t take much space to start a garden and truthfully, I think the thing that has really made this experience worthwhile is not having high expectations. Since I have never successfully grown anything on my own I didn’t want to presume that it would work, but that is making it all the more exciting that we have tons of tomatoes, three bell peppers and fresh mint.

We have not had much success with our melons yet (I think a bug attacked them), but I am still a little hopeful as I see there are tiny fruit forming on the vines that have grown out of the trough. It has taken roughly 3 months from when we planted to be able to pick our first batch of red cherry tomatoes. This is so fun that we will definitely be improving and expanding our small garden next season. I’d also like to start some pumpkins soon so that we can watch them grow with the arrival of Fall.

Do you grow anything at home? If you want to, trust my experience, it is definitely doable and with little knowledge and start up cost. This whole project only cost us about $75.