Gardening: Spring 2013

With Marc away at school, I really haven't been cooking as many new recipes.  When I do cook, it's usually been easy familiar favourites that keep really well like stew, meatballs, potato soup, curried chicken, and chicken fried rice). 

This morning I picked up a coffee and took the short drive to my hometown (Brule, Alberta).  It's a small hamlet just west of where I live now.  This is a picture of the view overlooking Solomon hill.  Once this view greets me a wave of nostalgia washes over me and I truly feel as though I am home.  I feel truly blessed to have grown up in such an amazingly beautiful place.

 

After my morning drive I decided to go to the community greenhouse and plant my tomatoes and carrots.  My Grampa always plants his tomatoes and carrots together, something called "companion gardening".  Since he always has an greenhouse full of awesome vegetables, for the past few years I've been trying to follow suit.  I now devote an entire garden box just to tomatoes and carrots. 

When I arrived at the greenhouse I was excited to see that some of the lettuce seeds I had planted just last week were already sprouting.  I planted a package of seeds called "20 lettuce blend" so I'm really excited to see how that turns out. 

I was surprised when I saw an onion growing already.  Last year a few onions on this side went to seed, so one of the seeds must have laid dormant until spring.   I couldn't believe the onion has a grown so much considering I hadn't watered this bed yet this year.  Needless to say, this definitely changes my perspective of how often I'll be watering my gardens this summer! 

I recently started taking web design classes at NAIT which has been a lot of fun.  My first class was Adobe Illustrator and I made a few fun designs including these ones:

Using my new found skills, I made my own garden markers this year.  After printing my images off, I laminated them and then taped them to a popsicle stick.  Voila - homemade garden markers. 

As you can see, I went a little overboard on the seed buying this year!  If everything goes as planned, I won't have to buy veggies all summer and I'll get a ton of canning done for the winter! 

How did you spend your weekend?