I am not a gardener.  At least not yet.  I don’t have a green thumb.  At least I don’t know if I do.  What makes me want a garden is having a baby in a world where food is filled with preservatives, pesticides, hormones, and the unreal.  I want my baby to eat real food.  My friend, Tina, recommended a book called Real Food for Mother and Baby by Nina Planck.  I’ll write a review on this book in a future post, but for now, something the author says that really resonates with me is:

“Real food is old and it’s traditional.  “Old” means we’ve been eating these foods for a long time…  The Old Foods Pantry is ample and diverse.  Meat, fish, poultry, milk, cheese, yogurt, nuts, berries, potatoes, leaves, lentils, chick peas, honey–and their close relations–are all old foods of good standing in our diet.”

I know I want to stick to whole and locally grown foods for my baby.  We live out in the country where farms and local produce are readily available, but we thought we’d also try our hand in growing a vegetable (some fruits) garden.  Now, we know nothing about gardening, except the watering part.  But we thought we’d give it a shot anyway, and learn as we go.  There is SO much information out there on gardening, I wish someone wrote a simple book on growing an organic garden — maybe even a gardening book for kids would be helpful to me.  : )

So first things first:  How do we want to build our garden?

After doing a little research, we thought that a raised bed would be better because it allows for a warmer atmosphere for plants to grow, versus growing them in the earth, where it is much cooler.  Although, I did read that some plants do better growing in cooler environments.

So off we went to Home Depot to pick up wood!  We wanted cedar or redwood to make our garden bed.  Come to realize they only sold pine wood and pressure treated pine wood (chemicals to preserve the wood from rotting and termites).  We were assured by the person in that department that everyone uses the pressure treated pine for gardening, but Greg purchased the untreated pine anyway.  He didn’t like the idea of an organic garden contained in chemically treated wood.  After doing more research, Greg came across an eco-friendly hardware store in old town Kensington, called Amicus Green.  There he found an all-natural oil that would preserve the untreated pine wood for years to come.  Score.  The typical Home Depot or hardware store does not carry something like this.

Since we live in deerland, we need to build a fence to keep the deer away if we want to taste the fruits of our labor.  Next up, fencing a garden.