My beautiful little urban garden....

This is just a post of pictures of my garden that I love!  It's tiny, it's perfect.  Next year will be even better!  I'll have my seeds well ahead of time and start them inside early and plant, plant, plant until I run out of room to plant things!  Hopefully I'll learn a thing or two this year about gardening that I can build on for next year.


My little raised bed using free bricks, the chain link fence as a trellis for the peas was free as well!

Below are peas growing in the same bucket as a sunflower.  The sunflower provides support as a trellis for the growing vines of the peas!

STRAWBERRIES!!!  However, this is an early picture taken a couple days ago.  Since then, my son has bitten the ends of two of them off and I'm guessing birds got another two?

My cucumbers!  This is supposed to be for a small garden, but it's apparently very happy and wants to take over the world...

3 buckets of strawberries!  They were given to us, so I'm hoping they produce a little more on them this year.

Eggplant!  Very exciting!  

 Red bell peppers

Go peas, go!

I think these are radishes...

Cucumber!

I'm not quite sure what this is.  It's not happy though.  I'm thinking it may be red cabbage?

Tomatoes!!!!

Again, I'm not sure what this is.  Cauliflower perhaps?

No problem growing mint!

 My dill looks sick!

Parsley isn't that happy either...

Poor, poor basil.  I know nothing about how to grow this stuff.

Sooo excited about my gutter system that is growing my lettuce!

Yellow squash

This is a corner of the yard with banana trees.  I've planted peas there to grow up the banana tree stalks.

Free vegetable seeds

I'm going to plant a garden.

I'm very excited.

I'm especially excited now that I received these seeds in the mail today....for FREE!

I received them after writing to the Dinner Garden people about 2 weeks ago. I'd honestly forgotten all about it until I received my wonderful package today! The Dinner Garden is a fantastic organization that has an awesome mission:

The Dinner Garden provides seeds, gardening supplies, and gardening advice free of charge to all people in the United States of America. We assist those in need in establishing food security for their families. Our goal is for people to plant home, neighborhood, and container gardens so they can use the vegetables they grow for food and income.

They only began this program in 2009 and have already provided seeds for more than 40,000 families and 100 community gardens! How awesome is that?

This is what I received:

• Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard
• Arugula
• Blue Curled Scotch Kale
• Fenugreek
• Mustard Greens
• Onions
• Snowball Cauliflower
• Harris Early Model Parsnips
• Wando Peas
• Organic Bloomdale Spinach
• Red Cabbage
• Daikon Radish

How exciting are those names? I love them. I love the little packages and the little labels. I love that I got the variety that I did. I would have never been so courageous in a store to pick these out! I'm especially excited about the arugula. Giada always uses arugula and when I try to make her recipes I can never find good, fresh arugula. The fenugreek is a complete surprise. I know when I was concerned with my supply when I was exclusively nursing my son, fenugreek was an herb that came up again and again as a supplement to encourage breastmilk production. Not sure what I'll do with it now, but I'm going to grow it anyway!

So, where am I growing all of this? Those of you who have been to our house in Savannah know that we have a tiny yard. Our entire lot is only .13 of an acre. Yep, not even a quarter acre!

Well, I plan on trying a variety of things.

Things such as vertical gardening. This link has several gardens we'll try. The first picture is so beautiful that I must try it at least! What a great way to fill blank fence space! The gutter system is also a must for me. I'll probably do this to grow herbs.

We'll also do container gardening. I found this blog and tutorial on making your own self-watering container. I know we can get the 5-gallon buckets for free, so the cost should be pretty similar to the ones the guy builds in the video.

Another thing I'm super excited about is the possibility of having a plot in a community garden in downtown Savannah! I've heard about community gardens in other cities and decided to search for one in Savannah and found one! We've applied for a plot and hope to be lucky enough to be granted one!

Hopefully between my container gardening in our yard and our small plot (hopefully!) in the community garden, we'll be able to provide fresh, organic produce for our family to eat all summer and fall! We will also donate some of our excess to the local food bank as thanks to the Dinner Garden for supplying us with our starter set of seeds!