Growing Things

A few days ago, we woke up to this discovery:

After the farm trip fell through last week, I started thinking about gardening. I've always loved growing things, but it wasn't possible when we lived in Washington. We weren't really allowed to do much with our postage stamp-size lawn, so outdoor gardening was out. I thought about growing herbs or something inside, but our townhouse faced east and west. Even on the rare days there was sun to grow things, we didn't get much of it. I did try basil once, but it didn't make it. Growing things here, though, is quite possible.

So, I trekked over to the store to see what they might have. They had a couple seed packets handing on the wall, most likely leftovers from last spring. I ended up with radishes, spinach, chives, and jalapeno peppers. Probably not quite what I would have gone for if there were more choices, but it works. They always have a big pile of bags filled with potting soil outside, so I bought one of those and carried it all home.

Even though I can dig up our yard area for a garden, it really doesn't work out here. The ground here is full of coral. I am not positive, but I believe that's pretty much what Andros Island is made of. On the south side of our trailer, you can't even dig a spade into it because it's solid. Surprisingly, a lot of weeds still survive, though, so it isn't immediately apparent that that is the case.

Because of the coral, container gardening is what I'm going to do. We have some plastic containers that we were using in our home in Washington but that seem to have no use here, so I grabbed them and the boys and we planted our seeds. I need to find another container for the peppers, but we started some of everything else.

I'm not sure who was more excited about the growing things in our containers, Wyatt or I. It's a lot of fun to share my love of gardening with him. He will go outside to check on them, and both he and Oscar help me water them with their little watering cans (which, weirdly enough, have multiplied in the move; we used to only have one, but now we have two identical cans....I'm still puzzling over that one).

We will have to find out what will end up being successful, but it's a good feeling to take some control over what you eat, especially when it can be so difficult to find things available to buy.



Edited To Add: Since writing this post, I have discovered we can bring seeds in, just not live plants. I think I will be haunting the Seedsavers website quite a bit in the next few years. Hopefully, we can figure out what grows best here and how to accomplish that in containers without losing too much to the bugs. And here I was thinking I couldn't get organic or heirloom produce in the Bahamas. I'm always happy to be proven wrong when it comes to such things!