DIY | Garden for the Minis

It's pretty late in the season to be planting a garden but we've been sort of drowning down here in the South East. I don't have a green thumb by any stretch of the imagination... I've been known to kill a love fern or two but for some reason decided that I should build/plant a garden so the small ones could experience the planting and harvesting thing for themselves. 

I picked a full sun area behind the sandbox (that before this was filled items destined for the dump and a huge sand pile.) The boy one helped me clear all the sand and weeds to end up with this.

We had left over lumber from building our deck so I figured I could manage to build a raised bed for our garden. Recently, we cleaned and organized the shed. I love having all my tools readily accessible! I whipped out the miter saw while the kids were napping and cut my boards to length and started screwing them together.

I didn't have enough of the correct length screws and the littles were sleeping so I had to improvise a bit. Instead of going straight through all the boards I just screwed my shorter screws on an angle through the joints.

A little trick the tall one taught me (that he learned from watching Brian Baumler) is to start your screw by drilling it in straight 2 threads deep and then to angle it into the next board and continuing sinking the screw.

 

 There! Now I had a raised bed with packed ground. I didn't have a roto-tiller  so I turned and broke up all the soil with a spade.

 

 I had a lot of top soil on the side of the house where we haven't planted grass so I started digging up loads and hauling them to the garden.

 

 I think I need a wheel barrow.

The boy one was quite excited to help me spread the soil and the cow poop that we bought to fertilize the soil :) He also spent a lot of time digging for wormens (which he now calls all earth worms since watching Backyardigans.)

A few days later we actually bought some seeds!

 Our planting strategy consisted of me saying, "O.K. Kai, draw me a road!"
Then Kai would draw a not so straight road with the trowel and then I would spread the seed through and he would dump all of his seed in one spot.

 It's going to be interesting to see how these things come up! Ha ha. I totally love though that this garden will look like a three year old planted it :)

And here is our little garden. I love the curved row of peppers that the Kai one was so excited to plant. As he plopped them in the ground he'd say, "There you go little guy." In the top right hand corner we've now fenced it off to be the "Wormen Farm" where the kids can still dig for wormens.

I'm really not too bothered about having my own garden. I frankly don't enjoy gardening all that much but I can tell that the boy one is already so proud of his little garden and is learning so much. Maybe he'll make a green thumb out of me yet :)