Here's My Great Green Idea!

We love planting a garden with our children! With the high price of organic vegetables and the need to cut down on food with pesticides we decided to grow our own! We use a small strip of yard on the side of the house but we can get so much in it! Last year we only spent $15 on plants for the whole garden! (You could do it even cheaper by starting your own plants from seeds.) It produced so many vegetables we gave away vegetables all summer long to our neighborhood! We love tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini and some pumpkins for Halloween! Our kids love eating vegetables out of the garden, it has given them ownership of the food and so they eat it better! It's fun to look up new recipes to see how to use our vegetables. We recycle our grass clippings from our yard and spread it around the plants to keep the weeds at bay--with 4 kids we haven't mastered a weed free garden yet! But the grass clippings take care of most of the weeds and the vegetables we plant survive the weeds pretty good! My motto is "if the plant grows high enough to survive the weeds, we'll grow it next year!" We are keeping 3 garbage bags full of grass clippings out of our landfill every week! We also learned about pest control using different flowers so that we don't use chemicals, our children thought that was fascinating to see how we can solve bug problems by planting certain flowers next to our plants! We made zucchini relish, sweet relish and homemade salsa with the vegetables from our garden and canned it so that we are eating from our garden all year long! We have discovered that growing a garden with kids does not have to be a huge project, it can fit into any schedule, budget, and space!