With Martin doing the Geocache Diet weight loss challenge Lisa thought she needed a challenge of her own. True to her nature Lisa decided not to do some competitive quantitative challenge, instead an abstract, creative, ‘feel good’ challenge is more her speed. Lisa’s challenge is to make her garden look beautiful and productive. As other novice gardeners will tell you, this is easier said than done.
When we moved our family back to Vancouver Island one of the benefits we wanted to enjoy the most was the long growing season (the best in Canada). In Calgary we always seemed to get snow in October and May and every month in between. This does not make for the most productive gardens and ours was largely ignored. Our garden was not much more than a few heads of lettuce and some annuals in the front planter pots. Our garden is now going to be a lot more.
Lisa is not going to be starting from a blank sheet as last year our garden was fantastic. We moved into our new home in July last year and the previous owners, who were avid gardeners, had done a wonderful job on the garden. We had an abundance of flowers and we were able to create a lot of meals using garden fresh ingredients. Most of our friends and family, and anyone who passed by and saw our three kids, said that our garden would be too much for us to handle. While they may be correct Lisa is determined to make it a success.
So what is the challenge? Lisa wants to provide ingredients for as many meals as possible throughout the growing season. She will be using organic methods to grow as much produce as she can in the space she has available. While the main focus will be with the vegetable garden, Lisa does want to make it pretty and have flowers to decorate our home. Not only does Lisa want to grow healthy food she wants to get the kids involved in gardening. We will see how much Bryce & Jada get into it but Annika is already excited to what she will be able to grow. In the past we have found that the more Annika gets involved with growing food the more likely whe is to eat it.
Calgary Garden - sad
Comox Garden - WOW
Lisa will be writing regularly on the challenges and successes she has with her garden and if she can make gardening a fun activity for the whole family. Gardening can be time consuming and fitting this into our regular daily routing will be a challenge on its own. It’s now time for Lisa to put away the computer, pick up a shovel and get dirty.
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