Carrots and Tomatoes and Zucchinis, Oh My!

As I type this my husband is outside cleaning out the yard shed.  It is a lovely February afternoon and my husband and children are spending it in our backyard.  It's wonderful!  This is what Colorado is like.  We get teased with these balmy days, you start to get excited that spring is coming, that there may actually be an end to the cold, dreary winter blahs and then you get hit, wham! with 8 inches of cold, heavy, wet spring snow on March 28th!  You get used to it.  We do have an amazing amount of sunshine though, so I'm not going to complain.  (At least not today, since it's currently 48 degrees out, sunny and nice.)

My husband has started to plan our garden for this year.  He talked about it the entire time we were eating lunch, like a kid talking about a trip to Disneyland or Christmas.  "And over there we're going to have squash and cucumbers and then in those boxes we'll have beans and we'll string them up this year..."  You should see the way his face lights up when he starts to talk fertilizer and manure!  

I'm not going to lie, I've been thinking about the garden a lot lately too.  But when I think about the garden and this summer I think in different terms than my husband.  I love having a garden.  There is nothing cuter than a little girl walking around with a fresh green bean or a carrot from the garden.  Abby likes to eat carrots with the greens still attached, like Bugs Bunny.  "I'll help you pull weeds Mommy.  Is this a weed?  Can I have a carrot?  I'm tired, can I go play now?"  Last year I gave serious thought to buying a Prairie girl style bonnet for Abby.  I bought the kids buckets so they could help us collect green beans.  Eli struggled to carry a zucchini 1/4 of his body weight down the hill to the house.  

And the best part?  It's our garden.  Jeremiah made it, we planted it (last year I helped!), and then we nurtured it and watched it grow and harvested the fruits of our labor.  

It's like having kids, only with faster results.  And I've never been sassed by a pumpkin.

We get a little better at this every year too.  Kind of like having kids.  We learn from experience, make adjustments based on what works, try not to make the same mistakes (don't forget to string the peas this year), it's a work in progress.  And it's tasty work.  And given the right circumstances I actually like getting a little dirt under my nails.

So it may be 3 months and probably a half-dozen more snowstorms away, but I can't wait for spring and our garden.  Here's what we're thinking of planting this year:

-Zucchinis (if you haven't heard, we have the BEST soil for zukes, like massive, feed a whole village zukes.)

-Cucumbers

-Squash

-Carrots

-Green beans

-Green peas

-Onions

-Corn (and then I have cornstalks to decorate with in the fall)

-Lettuce

And this year we're going to try:

-Garlic

-Potatoes

-Tomatoes (Jeremiah says if I promise to take care of them, I can have them.)

-Strawberries, blueberries or raspberries, I don't care which, I just want some berries

-And we may plant pumpkins again if there's room.