~ guest post by MRS

HandyMan loves to garden. I blame it on growing up in a farming family – he just loves to play in the dirt and grow things.

Planting last summer's garden.

The second summer we were married we planted our first garden. We spent a lot of money buying seeds and plants at our local nursery. Those plants grew well and we had no complaints about them, but it was pretty expensive to buy all of our tomato, sweet potato, broccoli, and pepper plants as well as the seeds for sweet corn, green beans, cucumber and peas at the nursery. The following winter, HandyMan began looking into ways to make our garden more economical for us and he decided to try starting some of the plants from seed in our basement.

That winter, HandyMan and I talked about what plants we wanted in our garden and he ordered the seeds online. It was a lot cheaper to have the seeds shipped to us and start some of the plants ourselves than it was to buy everything at the nursery. Assuming, HandyMan would be able to get the plants to grow, it seemed like a good idea. We went to a hardware store and bought potting soil, grow lights and lumber to make a table for the plants to grow on. HandyMan rigged the newly built growing table up to our boiler system to keep it warm and planted the seeds. Thankfully HandyMan was able to successfully grow over 50 tomato plants, multiple varieties of peppers and broccoli in our basement. We even had enough plants to give some away to family and friends!

Our garden was overly abundant that summer and we were able to enjoy our preserved vegetables most of the winter.

Blue enjoys a tomato from our garden.

As January became February, HandyMan started thinking about this summer’s garden. It is time for us to decide what plants we’re going to grow and get the seeds ordered. In order for the seeds to grow and the plants to be ready to be planted this spring, HandyMan needs to get the seeds started by the first part of March. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about our garden this year. Since baby #2 is due at the same time our garden should be ready to harvest, it is going to be a lot harder for us to preserve the vegetables we grow. We’ll either be anticipating a baby any day or trying to harvest our garden while caring for a newborn. It will definitely be challenging either way, but for us, the benefits of having homegrown vegetables preserved to enjoy during the winter months is worth it.

Plus we have wonderful family and friends, who have already volunteered to help us!

Have you started planning your summer garden yet?

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