My Garden Helper... Olivia

My 3 year old daughter is in love with our garden and has been by my side every step of the way. Every morning, right after breakfast she can't wait to go check on the garden. She helps pull weeds, sings and talks to the plants and loves to "make sure they are happy plants".

Olivia enjoyed reading to the tomato, bell pepper and marigold seedlings while they lived on our kitchen table. When they were a couple weeks old, we started taking them outside for a few hours each day to get them used to full sunlight, wind and slight variations in temperature (a process called hardening). A few days after we started, we had to transplant the tomatoes to larger containers. We carefully removed the netting from the peat pellets (they are supposed to be biodegradable, but I read on several gardening websites that they break down too slowly and can constrict root growth, so we took them off) then planted them in the plastic 6 pack containers that I had saved from some flowers we bought.

On March 24, we planted all of our seeds. It was a week or two earlier than we were supposed to but we have had an exceptionally warm spring here in south Georgia so we went for it. The soil was nice and warm, it's been in the 80's during the day and the 60's at night... perfect planting weather.

We have four rows of corn, three rows of sunflowers, twenty hills of cucumbers (it's a lot but we'll be making homemade cucumber relish when they come in), four hills of squash, four hills of zucchini, one row of okra, sixteen tomato plants (roma, early girl, and sweet one hundreds), eight bell pepper plants and one "giant" watermelon that my 11 year old son is growing for 4-H competition.