BJ's Garden

Several months ago, BJ began a square-foot gardening project.  He built two boxes about 2 feet wide and 4 feet long.  Then he divided the garden space into square foot sections and planted us some vegetables.  They have since come up, and we are now reaping the harvest--cucumbers, radishes, Alaskan and sugar snap peas, carrots, and more.

I must say, though, that the carrot seeds we brought from America don't hold a candle to the carrots we can get here in the markets.  The carrots here are super sweet.  We love eating them with vegetable dip.  So we will just buy carrots here from now on and use the garden space for something else.

BJ got tired of manually watering each plant each evening with cupfuls of water, getting bit by hordes of mosquitoes for 20 minutes.  So he designed an irrigation system with a funnel, duct tape, and a plastic tube with holes poked in it.  Now he just takes a bucket of water out there, pours it in the funnel, and he's done!

He later built another box for lettuce under the shade of some bamboo.  He found that lettuce doesn't like direct sunlight, and now his lettuce bed is thriving.

It is nice to have fresh lettuce whenever we need it.  The guinea pigs eat quite a bit of lettuce, and we like it for fresh salads or on sandwiches.

The biggest blessing to me has been this basil plant.

I love to cook with fresh basil!  It has so much more flavor than dried basil.  There is an authentic Italian restaurant right down the road from us.  One day, we ordered bruschetta there, and ever since then we've been hooked on it.  I came home, found a recipe online, and decided then and there that I needed to grow fresh basil.  So now we eat bruschetta usually a couple of times a week for lunch!

While I was taking pictures of the gardens, I snapped this picture of Seth.  He was "painting" the big rock with water, working at it very diligently!