gardening, year two

Matt led the charge yesterday and we were all back out in the garden again - after a long winter and lots of begging from the kids to "plant some more seeds".  The weather is warming up.... slowly, surely, the average high temp is definitely warmer than it was two weeks ago.  So we decided it was time to get the soil ready and toss out some seeds.

Sunday after church we stopped by the plant market for seed packets.  Started with 'little cabbage' which we know from experience (last year) is a sure-fire winner.  We also picked up some cilantro and green onion cause we've heard they also qualify as "hard to mess up". 

The seed packets are less than 50 cents each, so we each kiddo choose one thing they wanted to plant.  The girls were less motivated by what might actually grow and more motivated by the photos on the seed packets.  Each ended up with a beautiful variety of flower - we'll see what happens :)  And Matt steered Isaac towards a packet of cherry tomato seeds.... our tomatoes last year did really well, but we thought we'd try something a little different.  If nothing green shows within a few weeks we'll replant that cherry tomato spot with some tomato seedlings. 

First order of the day was to clear out the weeds and get the soil ready.

We handed Isaac the hoe and asked him to get to work breaking up the hard clots of soil :)

Isaac's attention waned once he realized he could hardly lift the hoe more than a foot off the ground... luckily, he loves to play in the dirt so his attention was quickly captured by other things - now the trick is going to be keeping him and his shovels OUT of the dirt long enough for something to sprout! 

And while little bro played the girls worked and worked.  Julianna is especially motivated this year and has spent little snippets of time over the past weeks "working in the garden" so she was excited to be out there with Matt and doing some serious gardening!

We put both varieties of the girls' flowers in this empty pot.... Matt thinks we probably over-planted it, but I'm hopeful that at least one variety will grow and both girls will declare SUCCESS!

Then we sectioned off the rest of the dirt-patch-garden and tossed out our seeds, sprinkled a little fertilizer and added heavy doses of water :)

The end result looks like this: 

Now the waiting begins.... waiting to see something, anything green start to pop up in our soil.  We'll keep you posted!