I see that all six of my readers (well, five, actually because one vote was me) voted on the weight of our new little (or big?) one! As the day gets closer and closer, I am getting more and more excited! It seems like this week is going by soooooo sllloooooooooooooowwww waiting for him! To distract ourselves from all the waiting we've been doing, the kids and I have been finding little projects around the house to keep us busy. Our project of the day today was ripping up our garden.
We have had such a successful gardening year for first time gardeners and such a small garden to work in. We probably planted way too many seeds for the amount of space we had, but it all worked out. I am so proud of Maida, Skogen, and Klaasen for all of their hard work they put into the garden. I'm also thankful for all the learning experiences we had throughout the summer of planting, growing, watering, weeding, picking, and freezing our veggies. Often times we'd pray about our garden and ask God to help our garden grow us some good food - it was so nice to hear the kids exclaim, "God provided!" whenever we'd find some more veggies to pick.
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| See our little garden space? It's the fenced off area in the middle, very back of the yard. |
I totally let the kids do all the planting of the garden. All I did was hoe some rows and said, "Throw in the seeds!" And that's exactly what they did! The day we planted, I remember telling Erik that I doubted anything would grow. As the summer went on, the kids took turns everyday watering the garden. Maida was my picker (she has the longest attention span, the boys would get board too quickly), Skogen was my fetcher (he loved to fetch me things like rakes and buckets when I was in the garden), and Klaasen was my canner (he loves to help in the kitchen).
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| One picking of beans - we got this much about every other week or so. |
Throughout the summer, we picked beans like crazy. Every week or every other week we'd get a couple buckets full and we froze 30-some quarts total. That is way more than I ever expected to get from our little garden!
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| Our first picking of cucumbers |
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| One of the biggest pickings of cucumbers |
We picked a grand total of 72 cucumbers! We ate a lot, gave away a lot, and canned 16 jars of pickles. I did not plan on making pickles, but I just couldn't stand to let any of the cucumbers go to waste. It was actually a fairly easy process and I think I'll plan to can pickles every year now!
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| Canning cucumbers |
Some of our cucumbers got super big, especially when we would go out of town for a week and not have a chance to pick them. I have never seen cucumbers so big! The kids had a hard time trying to carry them out of the garden!
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| I thought this cucumber was big, especially compared to my forearm, but we had a few later in the summer that actually got bigger than this one! |
We actually didn't pick any carrots until this week. I had tested one earlier in the summer and it was only the size of my pinkie, so I figured they weren't growing. However, when we went to rip up the garden, we found a whole bunch of great sized carrots!
Currently we have a total of eight growing pumpkins! It has been fun to watch them start so small and get bigger and now they are turning orange! There are a few that are growing from the fence, too, which is interesting to see. I wonder if they will hold on or break off when they get too heavy! When we ripped up the garden, we left all the pumpkin vines. Hopefully the eight we have will make it until Halloween and maybe we'll even get a few more!
I am so pleased and so thankful for the garden we had this year. I hope that we can do it every year and expand on our growing each year!
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