Square Foot Experiment

The Infrastructure

This "spring" we planted our first garden.  If I'm dubious about the timing it is because, as with all projects that I undertake, it is still not finished.  I'm a great idea person...I'm pretty lousy on the execution.  Dave is better on the execution, but gardening doesn't land on his Top 10 List of favorite activities, so it has kind of languished & lazied at a very casual pace.
 
With that as a proviso, I am pleased to announce that I haven't bought any lettuce this summer.  Not that I'm a huge lettuce eater, but I've definitely eaten more & wasted less as I've snipped it as needed from one of my four Square Foot Gardens.
 
I started promising Link a garden last summer.  I figured the more I talked it up & the more I got him hooked on the idea, the less likely I would be to flake out.  It worked!  He was very excited at the prospect of being able to grow his own "ta-na-does" & I was excited that maybe he would branch out & try some new veggies--he has, he just doesn't know it.  Did you know that you can't taste a fistful of lettuce in a yogurt smoothie?



I helped--I spread out the tarp.

Aside from the lettuce, our bounty has been limited to exactly 5 grape tomatoes.  Link has had two, Coraline has had 2 & I have had 1.  Dave, ever the gentleman, has abstained.  I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that he "doesn't care for" tomatoes.  But, we have some promising eggplant & peppers & a few corn plants that, though terribly behind their Iowa-field friends, look pretty good.  Everything got into the dirt pretty late, so we're rejoicing in every bite that comes out of it & ready to hit it hard next year with a little more planning & a little less construction!



I have never, in my whole life, been this excited about dirt.



One box done!

This year has been such a renaissance in my kitchen.  The girl who previously ate exclusively restaurant & packaged foods is now making our yogurt, baking our bread & growing (a few)veggies.  Dave jokingly asked if I wanted to save an orange peel the other day.  When I asked him why I would want it for anything other than the compost bin (another change at our house!), he said, "oh, I don't know, thought you might want to make soap or some other shenanigans out of it."  I took it as a compliment, but did not in fact try to find a new use for said orange peel.  I'm trying to do more with less, but I have my limits.

The very first fruit.

While I don't feel that the garden is necessarily a key to shedding weight or is even causing me to eat differently, I do think that the garden is an unexpected side effect of the journey & the changes that I have had.  Old Sara wouldn't have tried gardening because she was afraid to fail.  New Sara knows that failures are only really failures if you don't get up & try again.  Take that, you "wa-scally wabbits!"  You may have gotten my cauliflower, but you didn't get my brand new gardening spirit!

Giddy for Harvest

Our most promising pupil