Spring is finally here.  We are starting our vegetable garden for this season.  We decided to plant eggplants, carrots and onions.  Last year was quite an adventure, I randomly decided to plant pumpkins and cantaulopes (not doing my due dligience and researching the fact that these are actually vine plants that take alot of space to grow), so we spent the bulk of last spring and summer trying to manage the vines (we wind up with two decent cantaloupes (that were devoured by some random animal before we even had a chance to harvest them).


I have my kids guess which plants will sprout first (our guess in order of sprouting were: eggplants, carrots and onions). Of course the actual sprout order wind up being onions, carrots and eggplants.  It's fun to have them keep track of which will grow first (acting like mini-scientists).  We hope to add to our vegetable garden list (red peppers and tomatoes).  We already have broccoli and spinach (which seem to be growing like weeds).


Here is a photo of our plant nursery (we use old shoes boxes and line them with plastic bags and we also reuse the small mini plastic containers that seedings come in from the local garden store).  Next to the shoe boxes, you can see we have a bucket for rainwater.  It works out well, we usually get rain at least once a week.

I have a personal policy not to post photos of my family (because as a former New Yorker, you can never be too paranoid).  However, I felt compelled to share this photo of my son staring out at two wild cranes outside our enclosed patio.  As a former New Yorker, it still amazes me the wildlife we see in our rural town.  The cranes are majestic and make a weird knotting noise (sort of like a woodpecker) when they speak.  Just amazing.  One cannot get enough of nature.

We planted broccoli and the broccoli plants are doing really well.  Here is a photo of one of them.  I can't wait until we harvest them.  This spring I plan to expand my gardening endeavors to more fruits and vegetables.  I don't have much of a "green thumb." Growing up in the Lower East side of Manhattan, the closest real gardening exposure I've had are indoor house plants.  We had a ton of indoor plants but none of them were edible, so I am really excited about my own little organic garden.  I have noticed that the broccoli plants are a lot more insect resistant than my spinach so I hope the insects leave enough spinach for me to harvest.  

I am very excited.  I'm meeting with some other folks to swap gardening tools/plants before planting season.  This way, we save money from buying a variety of plants and also it encourages each of us to plant more stuff.   This can easily be arranged among a group of friends/acquaintance as follow:

Each individual identifies which plants/seedlings they plan to buy and then make sure that the others purchase different ones to swap.

I hope this can be a new gardening trend (plant swaps,,,,.... hooray....)