So, we’re not quite here yet, but we have a vegetable garden and I’m so excited!

While having tea and pie with my grandma last night, she said to me “Gardening is the most wonderful thing a pregnant woman can do. You have to get your hands in the dirt and just work with the earth. It will relax you and refresh you. You won’t be able to stop. I’m telling you, there’s nothing better.”

Jacob, Poppy and I spent all weekend working on our flower and vegetable gardens. We have so many new plants in the works. Tulips, forget-me-nots, wildflowers, POPPIES!, spinach leaves, peas, peppers, tomatoes, and strawberries to name a few. I’ve never planted anything in my life before and the experience has been surprisingly fulfilling and kind of addicting. I want to keep digging and planting. Little by little, year by year, we will grow our garden and feed our family from our own backyard. That is just so cool!

Just about every plant in our little garden is a gift from a friend or family member. This is truly a community garden! The forget-me-nots were originally from the garden at my grandma’s apartment. My mom took some of them for her garden. Then just yesterday my mom split some of the beautiful blue buds and gave them to me for my garden. Amazing, right? The tulip bulbs were a house-warming gift from our friends. The veggie sprouts are from their over-flowing baby vegetable garden too.

These small beginnings have me so encouraged. I love to watch things grow. The beauty of nature is truly stunning, especially when I get to see it to fruition.

I am no green thumb. There you go. I’ve never owned a plant or kept a garden. Well, actually Jacob’s parents bought me a beautiful jasmine vine a few months ago and so far, it’s still alive! But other than that, nothing green has ever grown because I’ve willed it to.

This is what our backyard looks like now.

A most beautiful plum tree grows in the southwest corner, but that’s pretty much it. This year, Jacob and I really want to start a vegetable garden. It’s been a secret dream of mine for a while and now that we have the space, we can’t wait to get our hands dirty. Unlike other new ventures I’ve taken on in my life, I felt that starting a garden required Internet research. I don’t Internet research many subjects, but gardening? I mean, come on! I can birth and raise a baby without consulting the Googles, but a vegetable garden?! With live, growing vegetables?! Now it’s just silly to do that alone!

And so, after some research and poking about the yard, we’ve decided that a raised garden is best. Cleveland soil is yucky and an in-ground garden would be a lot of digging for poor Jacob. Then I came across this amazing idea straight out of Africa - keyhole gardens. Semi-circular, self-sustaining, raised gardens that work in just about any kind of landscape. Keyhole gardens can be small or large, but still give more planting space than their counterpart row-by-row beds. All of the surface area in the circular garden is accessible and there is no need for pathways or walkways within the bed.

I’ve found a great tutorial here. I’m not sure yet that we will do a true keyhole garden in the sense that it wouldn’t be waist-high. But I definitely love the concept and aesthetic of this kind of vegetable garden.

We’ve yet to decide on brick, stone, bamboo, wood or Poppy’s old socks as border material, but one thing is for sure, we are excited to get going! I’ll keep you updated and hopefully I’ll be munching on some yummy cucumbers by the end of the season.