G Family: Our little garden

Like most yupsters, Kory and I have been talking about creating a garden for a couple of years now. It never happened, for various reasons. First and foremost, we had no idea what we were doing. Outside of that, planning and digging and sowing and reaping sounds like a lot of work.
Frankly, a nap took precedence on more than one occasion. Until now.

Some of you may know that Kory has the wine bug. Not just drinking good wine, but making good wine. This passion has led him to enroll in viticulture and enology classes at Yavapai College. He started earlier this month and he loves it. Anyway, one of his classes is on soil and water management. This class will ultimately be very helpful in irrigating a vineyard, but in the meantime, it has helped us (well, Kory, initially) realize that a garden might not be completely out of reach in our parched little patch of desert land.

So, we drew up plans, plotted out what we wanted to grow, figured out what we needed to buy, looked at the harvest times for our neck of the woods, and made three trips to Home Depot and one trip to Lowe's. (Actually, Kory did all of those things. I basically made sure our munchkin was fed, changed, and wasn't trying eat rocks or crawl into the washing machine.) Our friend, Taylor, also put in a lot of hours helping Kory build the final product. I provided them with beer and dinner, which I think helped me earn my keep.

The results are pretty impressive! I think this thing is built to last. I just hope the garden actually produces. I definitely don't have a green thumb - more like a black thumb - but now that Emma loves to be outside so much, I think this is something that we can both do with her. I also think it will be good to teach her that food actually comes from somewhere, and doesn't just mysteriously appear on the shelves at the grocery store. Also, I want her to know that lovely, indescribable scent that only comes from picking a tomato off the vine. I recently smelled that after having gone years without it - and it took me right back to the tomato plants my family had growing up. Ahhh....heaven.

The planning began on our kitchen floor - we were having trouble figuring out what to plant where, and this system seemed to work for us.

Coming along...

That is one good looking garden! For all you Illinois folks, we had to do a raised bed filled with good soil....i.e. - the stuff not naturally present in our backyard.

The back/top part of the garden is dedicated to Kory's first grapevines. These are simple green and red table grapes. The wine varieties are a little harder to get your hands on, so we figured we would start with these. The irrigation system that Kory built has specific drips for the different things we are growing. Pretty fancy stuff, I daresay!

My tomato plant - we bought it as a transplant. I'm sure there is a bunny eating these beautiful leaves as I type here in the kitchen. Damn wabbits! I'd like to make note of this lovely yellow cage. Perhaps this is very small-town of me, but I didn't know you could even buy these things - I thought the only ones out there were homemade and made with chicken wire.

These are yellow bell peppers, but we also planted red. Pretty much everything we cook these days involves a bell pepper, so these were a no-brainer. We also planted onions, spinach, carrots, and cilantro. It isn't much, but is all pretty fast to harvest, so God-willing, we will be enjoying fresh veggies in about 60-75 days. :)

This post wouldn't be complete without a few pics of our cutest gardener: