Gardening for Dummies

A couple of weeks ago our Relief Society had an awesome additional meeting all about gardening. The official title of the activity was Seeds of Self Reliance. It started off with a nice talk about how we each are growing in our faith and testimony just like seeds. We were given a bag of mustard seeds and a small pot to plant them in along with the scripture in Matthew 20:17 about being able to do all things if we have faith like a mustard seed. And those things are tiny! I saved the seeds and pot and used it for last week's FHE lesson on faith. 

After that there were three stations that we rotated through. The first one I went to was all about square foot gardening. My neighbor, Amanda, taught it. She has done square foot gardening for a few years now and had a lot of good information. There were also a couple of recipes we could sample including this baked veggie casserole that was good.

Next was a station about herbs and what you can do with them. There were examples of foods to make (um hello delicious herb butter!), ways to use herbs in healing, and even a recipe and example of herbed body scrub. It smelled amazing. At that station we also got to pick two herb seed packets and plant one if we wanted to. I went outside and planted some forget-me-not seeds and saved my herbs for my actual garden planters.

The last station was about container gardening and good plant pairings. This was helpful since I was planting an container garden! There were also more recipes to sample (love me some cucumber cream cheese sandwiches) and chalkboard stickers to label planters with. I snagged a few of those. I also was able to ask a few of my questions about planting.

It was a really fun night and I couldn't believe how many people helped bring things and teach. The tables all looked like they could have come straight off Pinterest. There was a whole extra table that wasn't it's own station that displayed all the fun things you could involve your kids in with gardening. My meager contribution was sharing my plant markers. :) I came home really excited to plant my garden for the first time ever!

This last Saturday we had beautiful weather. It was in the 80's and sunny and warm. I got up early and got all of my stuff planted (except my zucchini because I need one more container). It was kind of fun to put all the seeds in. Hopefully I planted things together that will work and hopefully the nice weather will stay so my plants won't freeze! I really hope my garden produces at least a little bit of stuff we can use. I'm growing broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, onions, green onions, parsley, basil, red cayenne peppers, dill, cilantro, and zucchini. I'm sure I'll be posting gardening updates as my stuff starts to sprout!