Building our Family Garden

Happy Spring, friends! We have been busy bees over at the Green Giraffe Eats household as we prepare for our second annual vegetable garden. We are by no means professional gardeners, but we do our best, use only 100% organic products, get pretty dirty (read: muddy) and we have a lot of family fun.  Mix that with rain, sunshine, and a little bit of patience and we are hopeful for another bountiful harvest this year. Here are a few pictures of last years veggies.

Is your mouth watering yet?! Mine sure is…I can’t wait to munch on those fresh crisp green beans in just a few months.

I have had several readers ask me to write a series on my garden, and so I am happily obliging.  I will try to update the blog as things progress, but I often find it harder to sit at the computer and write once the weather turns warm.  Please follow along, ask questions and maybe you’ll even get inspired to start your very own family vegetable garden.

Here we go….this is my garden, say hi! I feel like I need to give her a name. Yes, I’ve already decided shes’s a girl – I’ll think about a name and get back to you all 😉 Her mesh wire walls are a little wobbly, and she slants just a little down towards the kids play structure, her perimeter is dotted with beach buckets full of rocks and other treasures and tiny shovels so the kids can be “just like daddy!” To me, she is perfect <3

My amazingly talented, dedicated and all around rock star husband, Tony, built it for me. I wish I could give you detailed step by step directions as to how he did it and include blueprints for the latch-able door he made but I simply can’t. I can, however, give you the basics steps of what he did.  As luck would have it, I found two whole pictures of him building my garden last year! If I had known I would be writing a blog on it a year later, I certainly would have taken more.

How We He Built Our Garden

1. First he measured out the size of the garden I wanted, and marked where he would dig. He didn’t use spray paint, but you could to make sure you stay on track.
2. He used a shovel (mind blowing, I know) and dug up and rolled all the grass (he then gave that grass to his mom to add to an area of her lawn – yay for reusing organic materials!)
3. Next he drove green metal rods about a foot into the ground on the perimeter of the garden, about every 3 to 4 feet.
4. He zip-tied tight mesh wiring to the rods. We back up to a forest preserve, so we really needed to make sure to keep the animals out of our luscious salad bar. If you don’t get a lot of wildlife, you may not need to use such heavy duty fencing material.
5. He built a latch-able door system for the kids and I to get into and out of the garden, but keep bunnies, deer, and other critters out.

And just like that our family garden was created.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Happy Gardening!