I Never Thought I Would Be A Gardener.

So I’ve personally never been into gardening, so I NEVER thought I would be a gardener.

But during the first year of Covid, my husband and I decided to completely dive right in. It wasn’t really planned out, it was a spur-of-the-moment thought that ended up inspiring my whole family. Family members around me have gardens and have been gardening for years. I absolutely love to see what they grow, but I never was really interested in creating my own. I figured I would waste the seeds. Somehow I would drown them or dry them to a crisp… since I don’t have a green thumb AT ALL. 

It all started on a trip to Home Depot. We had a home project to finish so we needed to get a few things.

We wandered into the garden center for a brief few minutes. We ended up walking out of the store with a few different types of seeds, a thing that looked like an egg carton and a brick of dirt. We had no idea what we were doing so we just got what we thought we might need. A complete ‘starter kit’ for amateurs. All the things we had bought then sat by our front door for about a week or so. We eventually had nothing better to do and decided to plant the seeds and see what would happen. 

In the past, all my flowers have died pretty quickly. Let me remind you, I’m not a gardener.

Typically my favorite plant is a simple, low-maintenance succulent. The one thing you can’t really mess up or kill, right? So as we added water to the brick of soil I started to pack some dirt into the egg carton rows. As I opened the seed packets (not reading the directions of course) I realized I totally screwed up and didn’t germinate the green beans. Ugh. Already failing, and it was so frustrating. Luckily, we had bought 2 bags of green bean seeds so my husband (who is competitive) took the second packet and germinated them the “recommended” way for a few days. Assuming mine would die I just left them in the soil to see what would happen and to be honest I wasn’t expecting to see any results.

A few days went by and we saw sprouts, by then we had planted the germinated seeds too and they had sprouts. So excited we watched them grow and grow. They then began to get too big for the egg cartons they started out in, so my husband built us a garden box and we replanted them in fresh soil.

We have continued to have great progress on everything we planted, even though sometimes I forget to water them or think I might be over-watering.

We have fresh cilantro, rosemary, and green beans currently growing and squash is on the way! It’s been some POSITIVE we starting during a hard time and it’s kept us motivated and helped us put energy into something beautiful.

Seeing your garden grow is so fulfilling! Something that I thought we would fail at has turned out to be something that brings joy to our whole family. The kids absolutely love it! I hope to encourage you and your family to get some seeds and try to create your own family gardens. No matter how big or small you choose to make it, you too can create your own garden and be a gardener. Drop a comment about your favorite thing to grow or what you want to grow in your new garden!