nongreen thumbs

We have a large city-owned area behind our house that is seldom used due to its odd L shape. Jamie and a neighbor of ours were instrumental in getting the city to allow us to turn this area into a neighborhood garden. He attended a few city council meetings and had to take a petition around the neighborhood in order to make this happen. We have wanted to put in a garden for years, but our yard is very shady and therefore we don't have a very good spot to put a garden. So the city allowed us to put in 12 garden plots in the city-owned area, which we were very excited about because this area has few trees and gets quite a bit of sun. Jamie was very eager to get things going, so about a month ago he started two large trays of seedlings in our house. I admire his ambition and desire to provide us with some home grown garden vegetables, but I have to admit that two large trays of seeds sitting on our kitchen counter became somewhat of a nuisance to work around. :) Jamie transplanted the seedlings to our garden on Tuesday, and by Wednesday most of them were dead. We don't know what exactly went wrong, but apparently we have a lot to learn about gardening!!

The girls have been enjoying "helping" Daddy water the garden. They have their own small watering can and pitcher that they fill up with water and then carry to the garden. We have been trying to instruct them to walk on the wood chips that separate the plots instead of walking on the actual dirt. This really hasn't sunk in yet, so a lot of times they refill their watering can and then walk across the dirt where things are planted. Wait - maybe this is why many of our seedlings died!! :)

We hope to replace most of the seedlings with new seeds or plants, so hopefully we will have better news in our next post.

Violet & Olivia watering the garden (side note: they are not watering our plot):

Olivia watering (side note: she is not watering our plot again):

Violet:Olivia: