Garden with Kelly // My Adventure into Organic Gardening

So this past winter I was getting a huge itch to start my own veggie garden. I loved the idea of growing your own food and the rewarding outcome of being able to eat it! I've never gardened before and had no idea where I was going to start. I knew I wanted to go all organic and not use chemicals for fertilizers and keeping the critters away. I read countless sites and articles about the dos and don'ts of organic vegetable gardening. I have a whole notebook full of notes, no joke. And a board on Pinterest to go with it. 

I thought it would be a fun idea to take you along with me on my venture into gardening. I'm going to share with you all the things I do to prepare my garden and the things I come across in my garden. You'll get to see my veggies grow and everything I do to keep them from dying a horrible death. I'll share with you all the tips and tricks I figure out while growing a vegetable garden (and doing it organically) for the time! Maybe by the end of the summer, I'll be a pro.....

By no means am I a professional and I don't know what I'm talking about half the time. Like I said, this is my first time gardening and most of the time I'm completely lost. But I'm doing this little mini series for fun and so that all those other beginners out there can have someone else who is completely overwhelmed with them!

( I bought all my products from Home Depot. I'm using links from the Burpee site so you can easily see what I used. You can still have all these products at Home Depot.) 

I started all my seeds inside with this seed starting kit and these bio degrable pots. I did one row of tomatoes, lettuce and spinach in the tray and two sets of peas and beans in the pots. I started in the middle of March (not taking into consideration that we'd still be in winter in May here in WI) and after about a week all my seedlings started to sprout. After a few weeks my lettuce and spinach didn't make it. I think they grew to fast and they got really long and just fell over. I tossed those. My beans didn't grow well either so I tossed those. I'm hoping they do better when planted directly in the garden. I should also mention that all the seeds I used were also organic. 

My tomatoes and peas are still growing right now in front of a nice big window that gets lots of sunlight. In the past 2 weeks I've been moving them out onto the porch to get use to the being outside. Next week I'll start putting them outside right before I plant them. This helps the plant acclimate to the weather and temperature outside so they don't get shocked when you transplant them. 

 I wanted to feed my dirt with all natural compost so I stopped over at Chris' parents house where they keep a compost pile and filled up these three buckets. I read that compost is really great for using in your vegetable garden. It provides your veggies with great nutrients so you don't have to add extra fertilizers or chemicals. I mixed up the dirt with a shovel in the bed before adding the compost then I threw the buckets on top and gave it another good mixing. I then leveled the soil out so I didn't have random mountains of dirt.

I stuck my tomato/bean/pea cages into where I wanted to plant them. I'm still waiting another week to plant them just in case WI decides to freeze over one last time. So right now it looks like I'm just growing metal cages. I did however plant my spinach and lettuce seeds. I did one row of spinach and two rows of romaine lettuce. I plan on planting another set of each in a few weeks so I have another crop ready to go later.

All I did for the lettuce and spinach seeds is create a shallow trench about 2 1/2 feet long and I tossed the seeds in. The directions on the seed package will tell you how deep. My romaine lettuce and spinach was 1/4 -1/2 inch deep. I then covered those babies up and gave them a good watering. I used plastic tags to identify where all veggies were. We'll see if they hold up through the weather or not.

That's about it for today. In about a week or two I'll post about transplanting my tomatoes and planting my beans and other peas. Hope you enjoyed this first installment of my gardening series. If you have any tips I would love to hear them! Thank you so much!

Here are a few helpful links I used when first getting started.

Smart Gardener- this site helps you plan out your garden. It virtually maps out your gardens and where to plants things with how much space you have available. 

Organic Gardening- a perfect site for any question you may have about organic gardening. I literally found out so much by reading some of the things on here. 

Southern Living- This was a nice article about the how tos of lettuce planting. However it says you shouldn't plant lettuce for summer. I say lies, I think mine will do just fine. It gets enough shade that it should stay cool enough to not bolt right away. 

<3

what I'm most afraid of.

This will probably come to no surprise to those who know me, but my biggest fear is kinda random. It's not spiders or losing someone I love most (though that is a close contender). It's not getting stuck in an elevator or even clowns. 

It's whales. 

I hate them. 

More so the bigger whales. Blue whales, Grey whales, Humpback whales, Sperm whales, pretty much anything bigger than 3 buses. It gives me the heeby geebies just thinking about them. I believe this fear for whales started when I simply saw a comparison picture of a human to a whale. It freaked the hell out of me to know that there is something that is 100x larger than I am. It's just not cool.

I won't swim in the ocean. I won't even ride a boat in the ocean. People ooooo and ahhhh when they go whale watching, I would probably cry. And perhaps have a panic attack. If I happened to ever be in a situation where there is a whale on one side of me and a shark on the other, I'd choose shark. 

I was had a nightmare I was swallowed by a whale like Dory and Marlin. I was stuck inside this whale and had no where to get out. It was the worst thing ever. 

What are you most afraid of?

<3

The Home of the Depot and the critters that come with it

Today, I wanted to take you on a little trip to where I work. It's bring your blog to work day!

So I work at the wondrous place called Home Depot. Orange may not be my most flattering color, but I deal with it because I love working there much. In the winter I cashier, but come summer I am let free and venture out into the garden center.  I wake up at the wee hours in the morning and water the plants. You may be thinking, that's the most boring thing I've ever heard. WRONG! I love it. To be able to start my day at 4am (yeah that early) and just water plants all morning and not have to deal with customers, it's the best thing ever.

There is one downside. The critters I come across that early in the morning as monstrous. I'm not kidding, they're like something you would find back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

One time there was this moth, same size of my head (and I have a big head!) and he kept flying around me and it was freakin the crap out of me. So I shot the poor bugger down with my watering hose, trying to drown it. Sorry Peta... The dino moth wouldn't die!!! It just kept fluttering there in the water. I let him go and I never saw him again. I think I taught him a lesson that day.

it might have been this big.

Another time I found a dragonfly sitting on a plant that just totally popped out of no where. He literally had a wingspan of like a foot. Where the hell did he come from!?

I once got to watch a bird hunt down a different dragonfly, catch it, and then eat it like some kind of caveman. This tiny little bird just swallowed the dragonfly whole. It was a little frightening.

Alright one more. One time I was watering the flower baskets and I saw something move in the leaves. I usually always inspect the plants when I find a bug. I don't know why because I always end up flipping out after I figure out what it is and that is exactly what happened this time. So this albino spider comes crawling out and it is so huge! I spray it with my hose (this happens to be my only weapon, so I use it a lot) and the damn bugger won't die. This spider is really freaky looking too, so I took a picture of it and tried to google what type it might be. Never found a match.

I'm telling you, these creatures either only exist at Home Depot or early in the morning.

And it's weird.

<3