A Small Harvest

We picked several ripe tomatoes and some green beans today. We have had a good tomato crop so far, but today was the first time we harvested any green beans. Yum!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We are still doing quite a bit of gardening around here. We added some more veggies to our container garden including corn, spinach, and peppers. We had a few potatoes, heads of garlic, and onions start to grow in the pantry, so we also planted those. The potatoes and garlic are doing well. The onions looked like they were dying, but there seems to be some new growth this week. The basil is growing well and will be used for homemade pesto soon. Check out this pesto recipe and this pizza recipe we love.

This is how much things have grown in a month.

Is There Anything Eli Won't Eat?

One of Eli's favorite things to do is eat. He loves food. He eats a lot of food for someone so little. In fact, we are not sure where he puts it all or why he doesn't weigh a million pounds. He has Pop Pop's ears, so maybe he also has Pop Pop's metabolism. I guess we'll have to see.

Eli also loves to be outside. If we open up the blinds for the sliding glass door, he will crawl over and beg to go out back. We like taking him outside, but it can be challenging since he isn't walking yet. The concrete is a bit rough for his sensitive skin to crawl on.

Today, I went out to water our plants and took Eli with me. I let him crawl around a bit on the concrete even though Daddy is always afraid he will scrape his skin again like he did on the driveway a few weeks ago. When I wasn't looking at him, he picked a tomato off of one of our plants and began to eat it. I guess the pretty red tomato was just too appealing for him to resist. Luckily, I had the camera nearby and was able to capture the moment of juicy delight. He really enjoyed that tomato and begged for more.

This is a picture of him eating the tomato.

These are pictures of him with a mouth full of tomato.

This is a funny tomato face.

This is Eli signing, "Please." He wanted more tomatoes to eat.

I fed him some tomatoes the next day only to discover that they are a bit too acidic for him right now. He ended up with a terrible diaper rash. Poor guy! I plan to wait until he is 18 months to give him any more tomatoes.

Our First Fruit

Our first tomato was finally ripe enough to pick and eat. We were excited to be able to enjoy the fruit of our labor.

Here is a picture of the ripe tomato still on the vine.

Here is a picture of Caleb with his ripe tomato after he picked it.

Here is a close up picture of the ripe tomato.

Here is a picture of Caleb eating a piece of the tomato.

The tomato was very yummy. I was a little afraid that the tomatoes would not taste good once they were ripe, so I was glad that they tasted great. I would have been sad if all our hard work had been for nothing. There really is nothing like a tomato fresh from the vine. We are looking forward to eating more tomatoes from our garden.

"Now we won't have to go grocery shopping anymore!" (quote from Caleb)

Caleb has been talking about starting a garden for a long time, so we finally did. I got some Tom MacCubbin gardening books for Christmas. MacCubbin is a local gardening expert, and although his books are not organic, they are chock full of great information on what to plant when. I have already learned a ton from reading them.


We decided to start with tomatoes, green beans, and basil. We got three bonnie tomato plants from Lowe's and planted them in containers. I decided that it would be easier to do containers than dig up the yard, but we may do some raised beds in the future. The tomato plants have already grown taller, and we have a few green tomatoes growing right now along with lots of pretty yellow flowers. Caleb is not a huge fan of tomatoes, but he is excited about trying the ones he is helping to grow. Fresh from the vine tomatoes taste so much better than store bought ones, so I think he will really enjoy them once they ripen.


We got green bean and basil seeds and plan to start them soon. Assuming that our garden grows well, we have plans to add more fruits and veggies to it soon. I would love to create a strawberry pyramid in the fall since we all LOVE strawberries. And Caleb loves the prospect of not having to go grocery shopping any more, which he hates. :)


Gardening has become a great hands on homeschool project that Caleb and I are both really enjoying. We created a chart to track each plant's growth, number of flowers, and amount of fruit produced that we will turn into a graph later on. Caleb has been helping to measure each plant with a tape measure. He has also been counting flowers and tomatoes. His favorite part, though, is watering them with the hose. We got a few books from the library about how plants grow. One of the books has close up pictures of the tomato life cycle, which helped us know what to expect as we watch our tomatoes grow. We have plans to make a lapbook about our garden to chronicle its growth and to show off what we are learning.