Growin' Veggies

I'm working on a gardening project.

Does anyone else my age love gardening? Sometimes I feel like I'm the only 22 year old who loves it. Michael and I already have a vegetable garden growing in our backyard that has tomatoes, broccoli, artichoke, cucumber, and watermelon (The carrots didn't make it...). Now that the cooler season is coming around, I'm going to grow lettuce and carrots because they grow better during the cooler climate.

I've worked at a garden center for six years, and I think this is a big factor for why I love to garden. My family also has a long background of gardeners so I like to think that it's also in my genes. :) My maiden name is Farmer so it was bound to happen.

To start off my project, I bought four bags of soil, weed barrier and a plastic raised garden bed. I also bought a packet of lettuce seeds and carrot seeds. Tomorrow Michael and I are going to set up the plastic raised garden bed, cover the ground below it with weed barrier (to prevent weeds from growing up into the garden bed), lay the soil on top and then put in our seeds.

I'm really excited to get started! Luckily I found a kindred spirit who's happy to garden with me. :) I'll post pictures tomorrow of the finished product.

If you're a kindred spirit too, let me know!! I'd love to talk gardening with you.

If you have gardening questions, I'm happy to help - if I don't know the answer, I have the resources to find it.

Hiking Mt. Timpanogos

Michael and I and our friends Chad and Lindsay started hiking Timp at 4 a.m. yesterday. Yep, who does that? Leaving that early really felt great though since we were able to get the most monotonous part of the hike done while in the dark. Having to find your way through the dark becomes more like an adventure, and it makes the first part of the hike doable. If you plan on hiking Timp, I highly recommend leaving at 4 a.m. or even earlier if you can do it.

There are two difficult parts of the hike, the first part and the very last. Those are the two areas where you really have to do some hard uphill hiking. During the middle part of the hike there is a gorgeous meadow that you walk through. That, for me, made the difficult parts totally worth it. The meadow was filled with beautiful wildflowers that filled the area with reds, yellows, whites, and blues. I would hike the Timp trail just to get to that part again. I love flowers and hope to create a beautiful garden one day that can at least, in one part of my garden, mimic the beauty of a meadow with wildflowers growing up everywhere. Here are a couple pictures that hopefully give you somewhat of an idea of this place:

And of course, the view from the top: (It was a cloudy morning, the clouds are right at our eye level practically. Pretty crazy!)

If you want to hike Timp, we liked the website www.summitpost.org/mt-timpanogos-ut/151365 because it helped us decide which trail to take and details about the hike.