Gratitude leads to happiness - Day 16
Today I am thankful for my garden and for being able to grow food. Its not very big, as we currently live on a small town section. I have managed to squeeze in a wee raised garden bed and it's enough for me to grow a few crops to help supplement our groceries over summer.
At the moment it's winter time and we have been having quite a few hard frosty mornings, so nothing much is surviving, other than our silverbeat (swiss chard) that I use in my green smoothies.
In the summer months I can grow heaps of foods. I've grown spinach, carrots, tomatoes, radishes, courgettes, lettuce, pumpkins and potatoes. We also have a few small fruit trees with nectarines, peaches, apples and apricots. We got so many peaches and nectarines last season that we ended up putting them at our front gate and giving them away.
This was some of the nectarines from our tree
This year (if we're still here in summer time) we plan on growing some peas too for my daughter. She loves peas and I think she'd love seeing how they grow. I've also seen someone grow some popping corn near by. I think that would be really fun to grow so might give that a try too.
I'm eager to get back into my garden and looking forward to the weather improving so I can get back out there. Last year my daughter loved watering the garden. I'm keen to get her back involved in it. We still have some cold weather forecast here but I'll be starting to get some seedlings started in the next few weeks. That's something that I can get my daughter involved in. I'm excited for her to see things grow from a tiny seed.
Growing my own food makes me incredibly happy and I'm thankful that I have a wee space to have a garden.
Yay for bountiful harvests! Especially when there's enough you're like "hello neighbours would you like some eggs/lemons/other fruits/etc" because you have too much. I think giving away the excess was one of my favourite things (though to be honest I don't do a lot in the garden unless my partner needs assistance from another adult, it's more his thing).
My partner grew some peas in the aquaponics partly so we could use them in the kitchen and mostly so the kids had something to grab and snack on while they were playing outside. They ate a lot of peas and tomatoes XD Be prepared for her not being that hungry at dinner time if you spend a lot of time outside and there's stuff growing ;D
That's one of the things I'm looking forward to with moving, we've shut down the vege patches and aquaponics as we don't know when we're going to be moving (also the gum tree decided to drop a really big branch onto our main vege patch which has destroyed it) and it would be nice to set up at the other end (and also get out of this bloody limbo, I hate limbo! XD).
Yes! I completely agree. I was so pleased going over to my neighbour (she is seriously one of the most sweetest ladies out there) and giving her a huge bag of nectarines and apples. It was so much fun.
Your place (your current one) sounds like it has the setup that I want! A shame about the gum tree destruction though. Hope you can get all setup at your new place (whenever that might be).
I love the thought of her having access to so much fresh, good food. Last season she would pull off a piece of fruit (tomato/nectarine/apple) and would take a few bites, then pass it off to me. So she's got the idea about the food. Will be interesting to see if she likes it this season (if we're still here).
Getting set up won't be a problem. I'm just having issues right now because we're kind of in limbo and there's vew few things I hate more than limbo and being in transit (which are about the same thing as far as I'm concerned though at least there's a predictable end point for transit!)