Fall (ing in Love with) Gardening

Fall time not only means a return to school for our littles but a preparation for fall gardens. Now I don't know about you, but my childhood was full of memories of time spent outside working and playing in the garden to see our rewards at harvest.  This year in particular my littles have really shown a love for working the garden and seeing the fruits of their labor. Not only do they get to see the result of their work they also have been learning about what plants need to be grow and all the insects or bugs that help or hurt the plants growths. 

My daughter loves seeing the bugs working about the garden doing their part to make the garden successful.  We've started talking about things that would encourage or attract beneficial insects to our garden.  One thing that we have seen that she really liked was giving them a home or aka insect hotel.  SO.....now we are in the process of finding the insect hotel that will accommodate our bug friends. But that addition will be next year for our garden!  

This year's fall garden we planted some of our favorites of course and then a fewer experiment plants. Right now, we have our potatoes, green beans and kale going which is a good start for us.  The new plants that we are trying this year are cauliflower and broccoli we are going to see how both of those go and if they do well, we will be adding them into our garden mix.  Now our summer garden on the other hand we have learned that our state has had a warm season and caused our spinach/lettuce varieties to come in bitter and go directly to seed.  They were lessons learned over the summer, but the kids still loved seeing everything grow.... if only we can get our patchy backyard to take the grass seed as well as our little garden patch did, we will be in good shape!