Happy Spring 2009!

Today, March 20, 2009, is the first day of spring. The long awaited arrival of spring is finally here. With the arrival of spring comes warmer weather, beautiful flowers, singing birds, and planning for the growing season. In these tough economic times, growing your own vegetables may be something to try if you haven’t done so in the past. Because we live in the northeast, this is the time to start planning a garden.

If you don’t have a large area, start on a smaller scale. You can use pots for tomatoes and herbs or you can allocate an area in your yard for growing vegetable plants. Think about what you might like to plant…we start in April with cool weather plants such as peas, lettuce, carrots, and broccoli. After that, near the end of May, we grow tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, green beans, swiss chard, zucchini, herbs and whatever else we decide on while we are at the garden center.

We like to plant something different in addition to our usual plants. We grow our herbs in pots in a different section of our yard…basil, mint, parsley, rosemary, tarragon and thyme are the herbs we grow every year.

Vegetable gardening is very rewarding and offers many benefits such as healthy eating, exercise, a sense of accomplishment, saving money, and enjoying mother nature. It is very important to note to use organic gardening practices whenever possible. This will be covered in future posts. Be sure to keep visiting my blog for more information on gardening and interesting personal stories that occur during the growing season.

Hope you have a Happy Spring Day!