Lessons Learned from Our First Garden

One of the things we did this year to try to help keep grocery costs down was to have a garden.  This was a great learning experience for our children as well.  Princess and Buddy both learned how to water the garden and each got to pick a few things, while Princess also learned to help weed.
This was our first time having a garden.  It was not a horrendous first try but we did learn a lot through the course of it and things to do differently next year.

• Keeping the Bugs Away  - In the course of about a 2 day span our plants went from being absolutely gorgeous to being just about completely eaten by bugs.  Of course it was the middle of the week so I couldn't just run out to the local gardening store to buy something to fix the problem.  I looked on pinterest to find a solution, ran it by our family garden experts and gave it a try.  2 tablespoons of dish soap to a gallon of water (put water in first then soap otherwise it gets all sudsy) worked miracles.  At least until we were gone for a week visiting family.  Plus it just washes off the vegetables which makes me feel better about my family eating them.
• Plant More Bug Deterring Plants - Going to try to remember to plant things like marigolds and geraniums with our vegetables to see if that also helps with the bug issue.
• Plant the Tomatoes on the Balcony - The tomato plants produced a little but did not do so hot.  They were doing great and then looked very sickly almost over night.  We seemed to have luck with the upside down plant hangers on our balcony the year before so next year we plan to plant our tomatoes that way.
• Try Growing Our Own Strawberries on the Balcony - Supposedly they aren't that hard to grow and we go through a lot of them because of a recipe I will share in a later post.  Worth a try.
• Don't Bother with the Squash and Pumpkin Plants - They were the first ones to get eaten by bugs, died quickly and hardly produced anything.  So next year we will just buy those veggies.
• The Best Plants We Planted with the Most Yield (so far) - Green Beans, Swiss Chard, and Cucumbers.  We are still waiting to see what the green pepper plants and carrots do.  Although, I would plant a lot more carrot seeds as not many actually sprouted.
• Keep the Flowers -  Princess loved that she could plant some flowers.  We had 2 sunflowers that grew successfully for her as well as some smaller flowers a neighbor gave us.  We think it's great to get our kids excited about watching things grow!

I absolutely love that we get to eat things that we grew ourselves that are not covered in all kinds of pesticides or came from who knows where.