Gardening fun

Several years back we had a very nice garden going in our small back yard. 2010 was NOT a good gardening year for us--chalk it up to poor planning or lack of attention, who knows. I've been planning (in my head, no further than that) what I would like to do this year--it includes installing a rain gutter and a barrell for rain water, and doing raised beds. Obviously, none of that has come to fruition yet. But my friend Shelah over at Our Wicked Ways posted about her herb garden, and I realized there was no reason I couldn't get THAT going at least. Garrett has always gotten a kick out of growing things too, so there was no reason not to.

We had met the owner of Redland Organic Herb Farm at the local farmers market a while back. I decided to give her a call--we probably spent more there than we would of at Lowes, but there is something to be said for supporting local growers. Summer and I dropped Garrett off at school and went to get some goodies! Our haul (and the bag of soil) are shown in the picture above.

When Summer went down for her nap, Garrett and I set to work on getting everything planted. He spent some time painting one of the planters. The planters were all left over from previous gardening attempts.

Painting with sponges Grandma Becky had sent for Christmas.Garrett was pretty thrilled about every aspect of this. Here he is filling the planters with dirt.
And carefully transporting the rosemary to the back yard. He's been asking for a bigger wheelbarrow, clearly its time :-)

The end result:

I rescued the table from a neighbor's bulk trash. I think it used to be a desk--it may not hold up well since the top and bottom are made of particle board, but it was free and would otherwise be headed to the landfill, so we'll call it a WIN :-) We opted to just paint the names of what we planted rather than trying to make little tabs. Also not pictured is the large container I put on the side of the house with some sad looking bibb lettuce she gave me for free. We'll have to see how that goes. Not a bad way to spend the day.