Veggie High-Rise

We interrupt this blog to bring you a broken arm…

So life has intervened in the blog posting as life is wont to do. The oldest child went flying down a hill on her bike, leaving us with this conversation later:

“You know how you get going so fast that you can’t even pedal?” Yes, I do.

“That’s what I was doing and the bike hit something and stopped. I kept going.”

After nearly five hours in the ER and a reduction of both arm bones, she is in a splint awaiting a real cast. Home from school and bored. To top it off, she is right-handed so everything is tough to do.

Luckily, we finished most of our projects this weekend. I’ll discuss the pallet project today and then the others tomorrow. Remember when we created planting pockets from landscape fabric? If not, start here first.

We had chosen a few different veggies for this project. It happened to be 51 degrees and windy when we were planting so the little seedlings kept blowing over. It was frustrating the youngest child.

“Why won’t the wind just stop?” she asked. “Doesn’t it know we’re trying to work?”

Apparently not, because it kept right on. An interesting thing about the make-up of potting soil-it is remarkably airborne when being moved in small batches by small hands. It also has a cunning habit of making its way into eyes. After a few irritating encounters, we were able to scoop the dirt in without sustaining injuries.

Our next step was to pick out the layout of our pallet garden. The middle child wanted to plant lettuce, so she spread out the oak leaf and romaine starters and got them well-spaced.

“If we put these on the bottom, they can get the extra water that drips down from the plants on top,” she said. Good plan!

The youngest was very into seeds, so she planted the sugar-snap peas and cilantro. We made sure that in lower tiers, nothing was planted where the peas would eventually cover. Our big experiment here (beyond will plants grow in a pallet) is to see if peas will vine down when planted up.

The oldest child opted to plant the remainder of the seedlings in the traditional garden after watching the potting-soil-in-the-eyes debacle.

I handled the onions on top since I am the tallest. We also added some oregano for fun.

I have pictures of the youngest child doing her planting thing, but my hands were caked in potting-soil debris when the others were planting so you’ll have to use your imagination!

I also planted a few pots on the porch when they weren't looking. I put lettuce seeds in the shape of a smiley face, so we'll see what they say when it grows. Shhh!

Here is a picture of the finished garden pallet. All we need now is a little sun. Any day now. Any day.

Ta-Da!

A quick side note, I didn’t discuss this shirt project last time, but we made these really easy shirts this weekend from this FamilyFun magazine plan. We took some liberties and used colors and bling, but the painting part only took paper doilies, t-shirt paint and a glue stick. Five minutes each until the blinging began.  If you make some, send us pics so we can see them. They were fun!