Hidden Gardening Benefits

One of the benefits of gardening is having fresh, organic, healthy produce available during growing season. Another benefit is getting outdoors and being active. By being outside you get Vitamin D from the sun and by being active you can lose or manage your weight. I am not saying that gardening will make you instantly slim, I have some extra poundage so I can vouch for that, but gardening will burn calories, and eating the fresh produce is way more healthy than processed or fast food.

One hidden benefit I discovered was getting the kids to eat more vegetables. My kids have never been the kind that dislike veggies, but they are more willing to try something that they have had a hand in, including the garden. They are very excited about trying eggplant and the rainbow blend carrots that they helped plant.

We've incorporated both flower and vegetable gardening into their activities. Gardening with your kids also provides some great teaching moments such as learning about seed germination, parts of a flower, plant cells and reproduction, the water cycle, nutrition, and environmental issues. We started planting with my kids as an Earth Day project and since we've started to upgrade our gardens and they are bigger and can do more, they help with everything from planting to watering, weeding, and harvesting.

So far this year my kids have planted cantaloupes, and eggplant. This weekend we plan on planting sunflowers, and strawberry plants, and if the weather cooperates, we should get more of the seeds planted in the starter pots.

The weather was nice enough Wednesday to get my garden path lights out. I really like how they turned out.

Gardening Has Officially Begun!

The weather finally warmed up enough and the sun came out long enough yesterday to get outside and do some much needed maintenance. Since I am still recovering from surgery I did not get much done before I had to stop, but I did manage to weed a bit around my sidewalk path and pull up some not so pretty anymore plastic path lights that we are replacing with (hopefully) better quality stainless steel ones. My first 3 daffodils bloomed and I would post pics, but my darling 5 year old daughter picked them all. So I guess we can settle fora pic from last year for now. Those are the path lights I removed, there were 12 total.

My wonderful husband weeded my entire flower bed, raked the yard, and started weeding the garden spot which looked really good except for the huge fire ant mound at one end. I will try the boiling water method to get rid of them and if that doesn't work dirty mop water had killed them before and if they are still kicking after that I guess I will have to resort to poison/pesticide which I really don't want to do since I want to try and stay as organic as possible, but fire ants are nasty little critters and very hard to get rid of.

I am starting my seeds this afternoon and will post some more pics then. I have blueberries starting to bud, strawberry plants to try and get out, and seeds to start. It is supposed to rain this weekend. I was looking forward to a nice sunny weekend like yesterday and today, I certainly hope I can get at least one day of stuff done this weekend so my hubby can get the garden spot ready.