One of my most favorite times of the year is here: gardening time! As per usual, Jimmy and I planted our garden on Memorial Day. This seems to be a safe planting time frost-wise for the Pittsburgh area.
A few days before planting, the garden was weeded, tilled, and compost was added. We then picked out our seedlings, put down landscaping fabric, and planted!
Here’s what we planted this year:
- Two “sweet 100” cherry tomato plants
- One “early girl” tomato plant
- Five green bean plants
- Four “yum yum” sweet multicolored bell pepper plants
- Three “keystone resistant giant” green pepper plants
- Three green swiss chard plants
- Three “candy” onion plants
- Two “aristocrat” zucchini plants
- One cucumber plant
Remember how I said we were going back and forth on whether or not we would plant a garden this year, and how we ultimately decided to plant one, but smaller? LOL. We went all out. I think we’re just hooked on gardening and can’t help ourselves 🙂
We added some bamboo stakes for the green beans and peppers after I took this picture, and will put in tomato cages once the plants mature a little more.
We still haven’t finished our fence from last year, and we have paid for that because some rabbits (we think) have already nibbled on our green beans and swiss chard. Sad! One morning at like 6:00 I saw a rabbit in the garden and ran out in my pajamas like a crazy woman to shoo it out. It worked and the rabbit hopped away 😉
We put down some small animal repellant after we noticed the damage to the green beans and swiss chard in hopes that we don’t fully lose any of our plants. I’ll be sure to post some updates on the garden as the season goes on!
This is our second year using landscaping fabric to prevent weeds, and so far so good! If we hadn’t figured out this little trick, we definitely wouldn’t have been able to keep up with weeding and all the other projects we have around the house. Landscaping fabric is truly a game changer and I highly recommend it.
I think that’s all for our first gardening post of 2018. Yay! I can’t wait to start harvesting vegetables.
Living My Full Life 
I am amazed by you two!!!! You are so talented in so many ways. Cannot wait to see how it all turns out. I have never tried to garden, but I would like to someday. And favorite veggie- gosh that’s hard but I’d have to say sweet potato!
Aww, thank you so much, Mackenzie! I can’t wait to see how everything turns out, too! I think you would really enjoy gardening and I hope you get to do it one day! It’s so peaceful and amazing to see how all that hard work literally produces food to eat! I can totally see you digging up sweet potatoes from your garden and making some amazing recipes with them 🙂
Ally that is not a garden that’s a mini farm!! Haha but seriously I’m so impressed by your gardening skills already. Since we live in an apartment, there’s no space to garden. My basil plant it going strong though woohoo! Hmm..I think my favorite veggie is potato. You can do so many things with them!
Your comment totally made my day, Maureen!! I’m glad your basil plant is going strong!! I hope you get to enjoy lots of recipes using it!
I love potatoes, too! So versatile and delicious!
Reading about your little rabbit incident made me think about Peter Rabbit! Haha! Sounds like a LOT of work went into planning your garden this year—hope you get plenty of veggies from it 🙂
So funny about Peter Rabbit!! I hope we get lots of veggies, too! I’d totally ship some out your way, but I think they’d get a little wilty in transport, lol! I guess you just need to come and visit Pittsburgh 😉
We’ve used landscaping fabric to combat weeds too! Totally a game changer! Also I love that you guys love gardening so much that you have such a big garden even with a baby on the way!
Yay for landscaping fabric!! It really is a game changer with weeds!! We were so nervous about planting a big garden again this year with baby girl on the way, but figured we’d just do what we can with it and not stress if it got a little ignored, haha. So far, the landscaping fabric has done a lot of the work for us 😉