paradise ali

The first harvest of bush beans!  Sweet enough to eat raw but I’m planning to cook them up with SPAM!  I also want to save some for beef stew.  Eventually, I’d like to plant the whole bed in bush beans.

Things I learned from the experiment in no particular order:

• I need more patience
• MyFolia.com is an excellent free gardening resource to journal , make friends all over the world and keep track of seeds, transplants, gardens supplies and wishlists
• it’s not as cheap or easy as I originally thought but it is still very worthwhile to garden
• the cage needs to stay because, even after there’s enough growth to save it from being used as a lovely bathroom for cats, the Cardinals will try to steal the young beans and take the tops off the other plants
• the rapid growth of the beans is infinitely more exciting to me than the kids
• next time, I want to grow the lettuce hydroponically cause they take up too much space
• despite the square foot gardening promise of "no fertilizer necessary," chicken manure made a huge difference when the leaves started to look pale
• it is fulfilling to grow my own food and bake my own bread
• I’d like to get some bantam hens for eggs and manure (plus they’re really cute)
• the carrot seedlings taste like carrots and (insert drumroll here)
• I want to slowly turn my whole yard into food production space!

That’s not a surprise, is it?