My New Vegetable Garden!

Well, first we had our healthy pancake and egg breakfast out on the deck to start our day of gardening and wading in Tiggy's little pool. The day was gorgeous and perfect for outside activity after just 3 weeks ago of over a foot of snow .... who'd have guessed!

Below are before, during and after pics of the garden...


Breakfast on the deck



The day before, we took a trip to the Denver Botanic Gardens for inspiration. They have a beautiful veggie patch that got me excited.



Beautiful tulips ...



Our friends, Rhaeda and Jesse moved here to Highlands Ranch from where we use to live in Chino Hills area. It is so cool to have familiarity of people near us now. They went to our church Faith Community Church in West Covina. They have 2 kids (shown here) and a baby boy on the way.



The far right shaded area was all grass until we took some tools to it. (Funny, I say "we", but I did little work on this prep and Brandon, Evan and David did most of it. A long-lasting Mother's Day gift that will keep on giving. It took the entire weekend plus another half day to prepare the soil. We rototilled the grass off. Then tilled again and again while leveling off the area to be bordered by wooden posts to create this Raised Vegetable Garden. Because we need a minimun of 6 hours of full sun, this was perfect as that is exactly what I get here as far as sunlight.

There was some math involved (thanks to David's incredible gift of calculus and algebra) and lots of muscle and patience.



This is the side of the house where Tigist's window is and my office window. So now I can see my beautiful garden grow while I fulfill orders and work in my office. It is now a beautiful site to see.



Many hours of leveling, You can see the morning sun shades it until 10am when the sun starts opening up onto the garden.



Tigist came out each day in a different bathing suit. I'm still going through donated clothes and she still has not worn probably even half of them. It is fun to dress her in the morning and actually Brandon is the one who dresses her a whole lot of the time. Now, each night we tuck her in bed, we walk to her window and say "Nite, nite garden."



"Tigist, the water goes IN the pool!"

David and I decided to call our garden Tiggy's Garden. While we were digging up the ground, we both had thought of at the same time, the hard work we had put into the 6,500 gardens we (along with 80 other people from our church) built while serving in Botswana, Africa in 2003. We would go home to home (if you can call them homes) asking if people wanted spinach and cabbage gardens. We would give them as many 12 veggie plots as they wanted. We worked our fingers sometimes raw and came back to our hotel so tired and dirty ... but in a really satisfying way. The days were draining and full of unbelievable evidence of God, that we would fall into bed and fall fast asleep in anticipation of what the next day would bring.

So ... we felt it perfectly appropriate to recognize the "full circle" we've come in the adoption of Tigist and planting veggies again. I couldn't bother planting the cabbage, but the spinach is perfect and so we made sure we incorporated that into this full circle of a garden honoring "service, our faith, adoption, Tigist and her new life full of hope and opportunity". Just like these seeds, seedlings and plants.

So here is the Vegetable Garden raised and leveled. The posts are wide enough to sit at the edge and the middle posts are doubled so I can sit while weeding and harvesting the yummy veggies. The area surrounding the bed is really ugly for now, but in the next week or two we will put some sod and flowers and David is building me a cute little step area in the front middle section.

This is what is planted in these 5 sections ....

Tomatoes (6 different kinds)
zuchinni
squash (summer)
strawberries
cucumber
radishes
carrots (2 kinds)
lettuce
spinache
bell peppers (yellow and red)
Green Onions

The Herbs are:
Flat Italian Parsley
Cilantro
Sage
Thyme
Lavender
Peppers (Jalapeno and Serrano)
Texas Tarragon
Basil (sweet, thai, box and Globe)
Rosemary

Green onions, yellow & red bell pepper and 1/4 of this box are seeds that when I planted, did not pay attention to "mark" what I planted. So I'll call this 1/4 of the box my surprise veggie. The box above this one is spinache, lettuce and strawberries (which the birds are enjoying at the moment unfortunately.)



This is my herbs section. David is going to build me a cute step here where I will plant some petunias and tidy up the grass area all around the garden beds. With all the digging, the grass got town up. And behind the birdbach is Tiggy's bench.

The stepping stones help me get in the middle and garden some more.



This is yellow squash seeds, carrot seeds with 2 different varieties and radishes. Above this box are tomatoes and squash