Guest Post- Creating your own veggie garden The Teaeats Experience

Hi Everyone, today's post is going to be a guest post take on Veggie Gardening, we have actually just started a veggie garden ourselves and I have found it very helpful to read tips and trips from other people who have just started out, so I asked the lovely Taryn Gunn to step in and give me/ us some advice for anyone else looking to create their own veggie happy space.

Let's face it veggies and fruit and being healthy is so expensive these days especially if you have several kids, so for us the thought of a veggie garden of our own was very appealing and sounded like a great learning experience for us and our kids, anyway let me not ramble on, you can find Taryn and plenty more awesome foodie/ parenting/ life posts at TeaEats, I really do love these collaborations and have really enjoyed reading and sharing this space with her....

Every now and again, as a blogger, we connect with other bloggers and collaborate. It has been my honour to collaborate with Chastin before and again today. Thank you Chastin for this wonderful opportunity.

Chastin has asked me to write a little about my veggie garden. As an introduction to this topic, Husby and I started this veggie garden project in April this year. We saw it as a project that could yield many benefits - the obvious one being financial as soon we would literally be eating the fruits of our labour. But it was more than this to us. To us it was a project to do together and help strengthen our bond. It was a project that would stretch us as we studied and learnt what we needed to know to grow the veggies we wanted to grow. And it benefits the kids as they get their hands in the dirt planting seeds and then having the task of taking care of the plants by watering them daily and adding the epsom salts and crushed egg shells to the garden boxes.

I am not going to sit here and lie to you - our first year has not yielded much fruit and it has been laborious. We have had many little tiny carrots, and small onions and some lettuce in abundance and some kale here and there. But we are enduring. This is hands on learning for us - and we are loving it.

  

 

At the moment we have planted in the boxes beetroot, onions, carrots, celery, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, strawberries, avocado, potatoes, parsley and butternut. We are not eating all of this but it is all growing at a steady pace and I would like to bet my bottom dollar that veggie gardening requires patience in abundance.

What we have harvested, we have enjoyed. The veggies have been sweet - I am not sure if this is because we are enjoying something we have worked hard towards, or if this organic home style farming yields a sweeter crop?

Our beetroot and onion plants have started flowering - which apparently is a bad thing as the plant sends all its energy to the flower so that the plant can reproduce itself and it stops sending its energy to the vegetable. This results in smaller crop and less sweeter tasting crop. For now we are happy these are flowering as we hope to create more plants from these seeds and flowers and hopefully next harvest season are able to reap much. 

My veggies get fed crushed egg shells, and chopped up banana peels as added fertiliser. If you drink filter coffee you should add the coffee grounds into your veggies too. I also open my rooibos tea bags and sprinkle the tea around my veggie garden - giving the soil some extra anti-oxidants. We also add a bit of epsom salts to the garden once a month and we have a worm farm that we add the worm tea to the garden once a month too. All these added things are organic and healthy and fertilise the soil to help your crop grow well and strong and bear much fruit.

I would love to hear from you - do you also grow a veggie garden? What tips and tricks can you share? What experiences have you had?