Gardens are a great way to get your family to eat healthier.  Gardens encourage you to eat more veggies, and veggies always taste better when they are fresh!  If you haven’t tried to garden before I encourage you to try.  Start small with just a couple of vegetables that your family likes.  Make sure you involve your kids in the whole process.  It not only gets them excited about vegetables, but it gives them a biology lesson as well.

This will be our second year to have a fall garden, so I am definitely a novice.  Last year, when we first started our garden.  My husband and I went to the store to pick out plants and seeds.  I was like a little kid in a candy shop.  I wanted some of everything.  My husband kept telling me, “We don’t have room for all of that.”  I didn’t believe him until we got home with all the seeds and plants, and the directions said we had to plant them 18 inches apart.  Luckily my husband didn’t let me buy everything I wanted, but we still had leftover plants and seeds.  This year I did much better.  I just had a few extras!

To get us started we pulled up all of our plants from the summer garden, except for the peppers.  The peppers are still producing, so we left them alone for now.  We don’t own a till, so my hubby hand tilled the garden for me.  Thanks Sweetheart!

I gave up on seeds, since I really don’t have a green thumb, and we just purchased plants this year.  My mom was visiting for the weekend and helped us plant everything.  Thanks Mom!  We planted broccoli, cauliflower, acorn squash, spinach, romaine lettuce, kale, and onions. (I know the flags in the picture below say differently, but the flags are just too cute to not use!)

We also started an herb garden too.  We used an old broken wooden ladder.  We planted mint, cilantro, parsley, and some extra kale that didn’t fit in the garden. I’m not sure if it will do well in there, but we will see.  I was planning on planting basil in there as well until a friend gave me a really big basil plant. It was too big to fit in the ladder. (A nice problem to have!) So I planted it next to the garden. You can see it in the first picture at the top of the post.

Now we just have to give the garden a little bit of TLC and watch it grow!  What about you?  Are you currently growing or thinking about growing a garden?