Gardening Festival and Keyhole gardening

The weather is beautiful and we've been working in the garden a lot lately. We attended a Passion for Plants festival on Saturday. This was so much fun! It's a free festival to educate the public about gardening. The Master Gardener Association had 20 booths set up with a variety of educational resources, such as beneficial bugs in Texas, planting calendars, collecting rainwater, homemade container gardens, etc. Each booth you visited gave you a sticker for learning something. For every 4 stickers collected, you could choose a plant to keep. Since we have a 5 person family, each booth gave us 5 stickers. It was so fun to pick out plants to take home! We collected 3 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, 3 sweet peppers, fennel, spearmint, sage and parsley. This was so perfect since we were going to buy tomatoes and peppers this week anyway. I was so delighted with our 'prizes'. The booths had really good handouts available, so I collected most of them. I'm teaching a gardening class to our Sustainable Living group in April, so the handouts are very appreciated. I won't have to type anything up myself now.

The children had so much fun at the festival learning about good and bad bugs. The gardener would show them a large picture of a bug and ask if it was god or bad. Each time they knew the answer they'd get a piece of candy. They were so delighted. There were also free snacks provided, so they thought that was pretty fun. Most of the time they played with Nathan at the playground while I went around to the tables.

Sarah has been such a help in the garden. She's becoming a very hard worker and we're so proud of her. Last week we went to a cemetery in Austin to collect a load of limestone rocks for building a wall in our garden. She worked just as long as Nathan and I did, and did it so cheerfully. We loaded the van with as many rocks as it could carry....and it ended up being too much for it to carry. The payload capacity was exceeded, so the van tires started having problems before we even left the cemetery, so we unloaded teh biggest boulder and small other rocks and very very carefully came home, praying the entire way that we'd be safe. The van is apparently fine now, but unfortunately we'll have to procure a truck to do the next load. That's a bummer, because I was so excited to finish the project in one week.

We're making a raised garden called a keyhole garden. It's space-efficient and conserves water well. They're built in Africa in many places and I really liked the entire approach. The biggest reason we chose this plan was for the space efficiency. We had a small garden and we needed to maximize the parts the get adequate sun. Normally they're just built on top of whatever ground it's being built on, but our garden soil is very nice and we didn't want it to be wasted under everything else and being compacts in the pathways. We've been improving that soil for years and it's perfect for a vegetable garden. Dirt is also really expensive to buy. We had plenty of good dirt right there in the garden, so I dug up the top 8 inches of the entire garden and moved it so we could fill the raised bed with it.

Any time we disturb the garden bed, we remove any bad grubs we find. It's like a game for Sarah and Matthew to see who can find the most grubs. Sarah thinks it's so fantastic each time she finds one, and she picks them up with her bare hands! She gets so delighted as if she's just found a treasure, then she feeds the grub to the chickens. The biggest grub she found was the same length and width as my thumb! It surprises me how Sarah is growing...she's very much a lady indoors. She insists on wearing dresses everyday and loves jewelry, doing hair and makeup, etc. Shes' also particular about manners. When she's outside, it's a whole new story. She loves getting muddy and sh'ell make mud creations every day with the boys. She'll also make colossal batches of mud and leaf soup-- they call it Chicken soup because they think the chickens like to eat it. It was so weird watching her collect grubs in a dress. I'm pleased that she's not afraid to enjoy life and get dirty. She's a complete tom boy one minute, a prim lady the next. She has the best of both worlds I think.

Then we built a stone wall...right now it's about 18 inches high. Sarah did such a great job unloading the stones. The wall is only half done...we're waiting to get logistics arranged for collecting he next batch of rocks. I hate waiting.....I want to plant things today.