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Jumpstart Your Garden with DIY Seedling Starters

Teach your kids about the origins of their food with a little fruit and vegetable garden. It not only encourages healthy eating but also offers a great opportunity to get outside and explore nature hands-on.

I checked the weather forecast and (fingers crossed) I think we are in the clear. Spring seems to have arrived and full-blown winter is behind us.

This time of year in Chicago, our stomping grounds until last summer, winter still has a stronghold on the weather. A clear path to spring is far from near.

Philadelphia, however, welcomes spring much earlier than Chicago (hands in the air emoji). The fifteen day forecast has reasonable temperatures (despite a good bit of rain), so it looks like it’s time to get our garden party started.

Our house came with a rather large and lovely garden perfect for planting vegetables and growing a few fruits. The boys get super excited every time we tend to it (which admittedly hasn’t been all that often to date, given most of our time in the house so far has been during winter).

I love that the garden gives us all a chance to get a little closer to the foods we eat and learn more about what happens to our food before it lands on our table. M and I obviously have a general idea, but it’s all new to the boys. They’re quickly learning that food doesn’t just appear on grocery store shelves out of nowhere.

To give our garden a little kick start, we started planting seedlings in leftover egg cartons we had. The previous owners left behind a few bags of potting soil with their compost pile, so we put those to good use to plant the seeds.

We used wooden sticks to label the sections where we planted each set of seeds.

Then we brought the seeds in the house and are doing out best to give them lots of sunlight.

J loved helping to plant all the seeds.

T, on the other hand, had no interest whatsoever. He played hockey in the driveway the entire time. He’s a sports fanatic and spends hours a day playing all sorts of sports, so it wasn’t much of a surprise. He’s shown much more interest, however, when we’re in the garden digging and toiling in the dirt.

In a couple weeks (we hope), when it’s clear the cold weather is behind us, I’m pumped to move our seedlings to the garden to give them a chance to really grow.

I anticipate we will have some other hungry animals to contend with who would also like to eat our garden (crows and groundhogs, we’re looking at you). But we are up for the challenge and gonna give this new gardening thing our best shot.

We don’t really know what we’re doing, so expectations are low. Anything we harvest will probably be over-celebrated (ha) and most definitely eaten, of course.

If you have a green thumb, I’d love to hear your gardening tips, particularly fruit and vegetable plants. We’re rookies, so wish us luck!

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