I’ve been growing food for a couple of years now. However, it’s always been on a balcony garden and my yield has always been very small. In this new house we have a pretty decent sized yard. So, this is the first time I’ll have enough space to grow more than a couple handfuls of tomatoes and herbs. I’ve been so excited about gardening I just couldn’t wait till spring. And since this is California, Jeff and I went to the local nursery and picked up a few plants to tide me over through the winter and also until he could make me my raised bed I’ve always wanted.

We have some containers filled with chard and cabbage (container cabbage- who knew there was such a thing?) as well as a little container of lemon thyme, winter peas and celery.

Everything has been doing very well except for some snail damage to some lettuce and our cabbage but we’re trying to keep them at bay with crushed egg shells and salt and any other snail tricks we read about.

The past two months or so, my wonderful husband has been hard at work building me a raised bed. He finally completed it this weekend and I got to finish planting my winter garden.

The finished raised bed! We would have loved to fill it up with composted soil from the worm bin Jeff built a few years back but we have yet to get that up and running. It’s on the to do list! So, we filled it up with some organic soil from the nursery and I went ahead and planted what we had left. Some brussel sprouts, lettuce, broccoli and more beans. We shall see how it turns out with it being our first go at this raised bed thing and the fact that we are attempting to grow things in the dead of winter but I had success last year on my balcony in Irvine, so what’s the harm in trying. Here’s to growing in 2013!