Herb Garden

I'm so proud of us - we planted an herb garden today!!! This is big for me because in general I hate plants. I always manage to kill them. I can never figure out how much or little to water them, and where they should be for the best sun. Basically every single plant I have ever had has died. I have a huge brown thumb. So, its big that we are attempting an herb garden!!

The reason I decided I wanted one is that with the Fresh 20 meal plan we've been doing (this is our 5th week - woohoo!) they require a lot of fresh herbs in their recipes. And somehow I never use all of the herbs that I buy - I always end up with a HUGE thing of parsley left in our fridge and then feel so wasteful. With a herb garden though, I can just go outside, grab a few leaves, and be ready to cook! :) With no waste!

Matt was awesome and cleared away this nice little space in our backyard that is raised so that I can stand on these railroad ties and garden. I don't even have to get all dirty kneeling in the ground. Not that that's bad, but its very convenient for me to come check on them / water them. We planted basil, cilantro, thyme, and parsley. In addition to herbs we also planted two tomato plants and two pepper plants. I'm hoping that we can get some awesome tomatoes and peppers this summer. If the deer/bunnies/groundhogs/racoons don't eat them... and to keep that from happening I bought this "guaranteed" pest repellent spray!! This stuff is POTENT. It is OK to use on edible plants, and nothing poisonous is in it, but it sure is smelly! The guy at Home Depot claimed that it has fox urine in it? Gross. I did not see that on the ingredients label, just a lot of garlic, so I'm hoping that its just the strong garlic smell that I'm smelling when I spray it, and NOT fox urine. Matt offered to just go out and do his business on them every night if that would help. I told him absolutely no. Boys and their wanting to pee on everything. (Did anyone have little brothers? Mine used to regularly pee on our backyard shed / have pee competitions for whose could be the highest / longest) (Sorry to my brothers for this embarrassing story!!)

Anyway, enough talking about pee, I forgot to take any herb garden pictures today, I'll add some to the next post. Here is a cute one of Ellen playing in her turtle sandbox! The weather has been super nice out and Ellen loves being outside. She just ran around doing who knows what while Matt and I did yard-work this afternoon for about 2 hours. It was great, this summer is going to be awesome.


p.s. yes she IS wearing butterfly pants. :)