From Lawn to Garden Week 12-- We have fruit!!!

Lots of warm weather mingled with some decent rain storms means that our plants took off!

We woke up to a beautiful morning! The first thing on the agenda was for my husband and three oldest kids to plant our blueberry pushes. They arrived from True Vine Ranch in excellent condition as promised. They are three year old plants and one of them already has at least 50 blueberries on it! While they prepared the ground and added peat moss and pine chips, I painted the kitchen ceiling. Finally. My little one year old played nearby with some containers as we checked a big to do item off our home improvement list.

After we finished painting and my little guy went down for his morning nap, I headed out back to join the others. I showed my daughter how to hoe in between the beds.

Our peas are growing nice and tall. We have homeschooling friends down in Virginia who harvested their first pea this week so hopefully in a few weeks we will join them!

Our radishes are doing super well-- they are an instant gratification seed! They grow so rapidly and we are really looking forward to them being done shortly but for now it's fun to see how quickly they grow. You can also see our carrots which are slowly but surely growing. I did plant a few more seeds today as we only have 14 carrot plants right now and we will see if they mature.

The lettuce plants are now about 4-5 inches high and growing quickly. We have them planted at all different intervals so they all aren't ready to be picked at once.

Newly planted this week and beginning to grow are our pickling cucumbers and regular pole beans.

We just planted purple pole beans and hopefully those too will begin to sprout and grow (Isn't my little helper adorable?!)

Behind the shed we were going to just fill the entire area with new soil since this area used to be stone driveway. However, when my husband decided to switch to an easier compost bin we had leftover lumber from my previous attempt that I never had time to finish. So, we hammered them into some awkward beds, filled with soil, and now peppers and zucchini are growing there. We still need to plant our regular cucumbers back there and that will be our last big thing to plant. The corn also got planted in between the one side of the shed and fence in a 9x5 seed rectangle and I am a little bit skeptical about how it will do. This is more of our year to learn how to grow corn and this is our trial run. If it works, awesome, if not, we will learn how to improve it next year.

The three year old grape vine has two little bunches of grapes! The kids are ecstatic! Well, honestly, mom and dad are as well! This is the first fruit of our labor that we can visibly see so far and it fueled confidence and excitement into our morning of work. The strawberry plants continue to do well and soon we will begin plucking their blossoms.

So there you have it... lots of growth and excitement! All of our seedlings that we grew over the winter are now planted. We have 40+ tomato plants growing and I planted a row of canning tomatoes today as well, ya know, just in case we need more. We have decided to call our little backyard garden the Urban Daisy seeing as the first summer that we lived at our home I planted daisies from seed and they come back every year so the name sort of pays homage to our first "grown from seed" plant.