My Small Organic Garden

I decided that a cool way to dip my toes into making my own food would be to also grow the food that I cook with. Seems simple enough, right? Wrong. Growing my those plants was very tedious and time-consuming, but it was a lot of fun seeing the plants grow every day and then seeing the end product in the dishes I make. But before I started, there were a couple of problems I need to solve before I began.

1. I had, at the time, no clue how to properly plant the plants and how to grow them correctly and continually care for them throughout the summer. 
2. I did not have any plants in mind that I wanted to grow, nor did I have the supplies to do so.
3. Wildlife like deers and rabbits cross through our lawn, so I needed a way to keep those animals away from the plants. 

With these 3 problems in mind, I set out to start my own garden, and hopefully, I would eventually find a solution to each problem. Solving the first problem was easy, a quick internet search gave me thousands of various plants that I could grow and use in cooking. The obvious ones were tomatoes and lettuce, but some of the other ones that came up were banana peppers, basil, and spinach. To solve the second part of this problem, I spoke to one of my mom's friends, who has an incredibly green thumb, and she agreed to help me out. Together we went to Home Depot and bought several different plants and a mobile planter. She helped me pick out both the right plants and a good combination of them such that it would lead to a healthier planter. Then she gave me a tip for keeping the wildlife out of the food; she said to tape Irish spring soap to a fork and stick it in the groud. Animals hate the smell of the soap, so they stay away from it, keeping the vegetables safe. I want to say a huge thank you to her because she made the process so easy and was very helpful in each step of the process.

The Planter

This is an image of the planter about a week after planting the seedlings. It has the spinach in the top left corner, the red romaine lettuce in the bottom left corner, parsley in the top middle, a pepper plant directly underneath that, and finally three basil plants growing around the tomato in the bottom right corner. I am trying to use each of the vegetables in some recipes that I will be posting in the near future.

My First Tomato

This tomato is the first tomato that I harvested from the planter, it was extremely satisfying to see my hard work paying off in the form of something tangible. This tomato served a great purpose as part of the filling in one of my grilled cheese sandwiches.