Oh, how the garden grows….

Yep, the Murphy clan has entered the world of gardening thanks to an already existing above ground garden left by the previous owners of our house and an urge to save money by growing our own veggies (Dave Ramsey would be so proud).

This project has been envisioned in phases.  The first phase was to build a fence to separate the dogs from our garden.  Sean took on the bulk of this job and got it all done before Easter.  The Easter bunny even put a bunch of seed packages in the eggs for our Murphy egg hunt.  I love when a good plan comes together.

Phase 2 would involve getting the abandoned and dog dug out “garden” back in shape. Oh and then planting the Easter bunny seeds.  We hoped all of these tasks could happen today.  The day started with a trip to Home Depot!  Our kids love Home Depot because the garden center has little sheds where they can run in and out and play this game they created called “Little Cousins” where they only talk in made up Spanish words.  Yep, those are our kids!

They were playing this game this morning and another two year old (from a 1 kid family) started playing with them.  By the time Jake (our new friend) had finished playing with the 3b’s, Sean and I started joking that we had convinced the couple to head home and make a sibling for Jake.  This is first.  Normally, the combo of our kids and our parenting skills act as amazing birth control for parents and non-parents alike.  Dare I say, we may be coming into a new place as a family.  I can get into that :)

After an amazing time encouraging procreation at Home Depot we came home to till and plant seeds.  What a great family project this has turned into!

Bree was our most energetic helper!  She helped till the soil, took a break, helped me draw up a map of where the seeds would go and finally planted them with Sean!  Bennett and Bauer were more observers but I think they will get more into the watering piece as the plants start to grow.

We planted a bunch of herbs, carrots, cantaloupes, strawberries, green beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and broccoli.

This was the before picture!  There was a bunch of leftover green onions plants growing out of control and a lot of fabulous mint herb growing all the edges.  We pulled the green onions and calmed down the mint :)

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The owl came with the house too! JEALOUS???!!!

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Bennett spent most of his time keeping  our recently acquired soil from getting away!

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After all the tilling, we marked off foot wide rows with string.  Are you convinced we may know what we are doing??!!  I saw it online!  I also made a map of where were going to plant all our crops!

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So excited for our herbs to grow…even more motivation to cook!

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Bennett showed that dirt who was boss.

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Strawberries…Bree waited all morning to plant these!

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Carrots…our first attempt at this didn’t go well when we lived at Arlington.  Fingers crossed it was just the lack of sunshine on Brookside that was the main culprit.  We have abundant sunshine here in Plano!

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Counting cantaloupe seeds with Daddy.

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We did it!  We have lots of ideas and not all of them happen, so regardless of what grows, we are pretty darn impressed with ourselves!

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The greatest part of all was that our kids had fun with the process.  We want to show them that being outside and “working” is good for you.

So I’ll leave you today with our dirt surfing kids:  Small B…Medium B…and finally Large B!

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Happy Spring everyone!

About juco

The Murphy Clan is onto year 4 of this parenting adventure. We are happy to keep sharing some our proudest and silliest moments with all our family and friends. We hope you enjoy our new format!
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