Every needful thing...

Tylie and Jake planting the "starts" for our garden

The ever continuing project of food storage

Mason playing in his "tunnel" while the rest of us bustle around playing in dirt.

With this rocky economy Jake and I have tried to be as optimistic as possible but try to prepare ourselves for the worst. It is times like these that the Prophet's words really start to resonate and we begin to see the wisdom in their counsel. Jake and I have always had food storage but this year we have decided to step it up a little. My parents are going to plant a really large garden for all the family and anyone in the neighborhood that would like to join in so we decided to do a small garden of our own. It won't be near the size of my parents since we don't have over an acre of land like they do but we will do our best. We have done some studying and learned that some plants are good to start indoors and then move outdoors when it warms up. On tuesday Jake cleaned out my pantry of every plastic cup we owned, filled them with dirt, and planted our little seeds. We had to find the place in the house that gets the most sun which convenintly is my bedroom. Lovely! So for a few weeks by room has been turned into a mini greenhouse. Last year Jake did an experiment. He wanted to know how well watermelon seeds would grow if taken straight out of your average watermelon and spit into a cup. That is exactly what he did. He ate some watermelon, spit the seeds in a cup, covered them with dirt, and placed them in my kitchen window well to see what would happen. It worked like a charm and before we knew it we had full blown watermelon plants. We moved them up to my mom's garden and the flourished. Unfortunately, we planted them too late in the season and they never grew to full maturity but we had about 10 baby watermelons growing well before that nasty frost came in killed our hopes. I can only hope that our organized efforts will turn out as well as our scattered efforts last year. If it works as well as we are hoping, you all will probably have a zucchini and watermelon with your name on it waiting in our garden!