Jenni's Kitchen

It’s almost February, do you know what that means? For those of us who have a garden, and for those of us who want one, it’s time. Time to start planning, reading, designing, even starting some seeds indoors if you are going to be doing that this year! I thought I would share with you a couple of the books that I’ve gleaned a lot of inspiration from. Gardening is not something that comes naturally to everyone, and some of us (even those of us who’ve spent a lot of time gardening when we were growing up) can use some extra help from people who have been successful.

I love gardening books, if you are wanting to start small this year with a couple of raised beds I would really suggest the book, “All New Square Foot Gardening”, it was the inspiration of my square foot gardens a few years back, it was simple and easy to flip through and gain some knowledge about how to get started. Very easy read!

This next book is great too, “Carrots Love Tomatoes” is a book about what plants like to be planted together, and which to keep apart from each other, it also give a little info on each of the plants mentioned and is a helpful resource for the gardener.

And for the more advanced gardener, or the family who is wanting to turn their whole yard and maybe even their house into a living breathing garden that feeds you and the rest of the neighborhood the whole year through, this next book is for you! “Gaia’s Garden” is a great resource for the gardener who wants to turn their yard into a food forest that eventually will take care of itself, this is our long term goal and I’ve learned so much from this book. It’s inspirational and somehow takes the fright out of tackling such a huge project! One step at a time.

Three great resources, I hope this helps you in your endeavors to growing some food for your family this coming year! Life is full of many changing seasons. I’m hoping to revamp my garden this year. We had to kind of tear up our garden to get my mom’s house moved in so I’m not sure what will happen with our garden this year, we are also having a baby in June so I may have to push my garden out another year, but it’s always in the back of my mind, I look forward to the day when I’m providing a good amount of food for our family from our garden, but like everything that is worth while, it takes time and effort! Happy Gardening!

This isn’t the best picture nor did my garden do the best that year :) But you can see, some of the sections are planted and some aren’t, because I was spacing things out, I had planted some rows of carrots (the kids eat a lot of carrots) and was waiting a couple weeks to plant some more :) Also, something I’m going to change when we do an overhaul on our garden plans; I made really wide spaces (I think about 5-6 ft) between garden boxes, so that I could mow between the boxes with our riding lawn mower. Next time I will make the boxes a lot closer together and just use the weed eater or plant a low lying ground cover between the rows. As soon as I can get the other photo to upload I will show you what I mean. :) The wide spaces seem like wasted space to me, and mowing with a rider between the rows actually just spreads weed seeds (I guess so would the weed eater). Ground cloth over the pathways, or planting a ground cover would be a better plan. Hope that helps! And we have chickens, a fence around the whole garden will be nice too!