Horticultural Therapy Beds

Hi there and Happy Friday!

I realized I hadn't really shown you all good pictures of Ryan's horticultural beds. Here's a shot of the first one. He has marigolds on the end, three or four different types of tomatoes next to that, radishes, carrots and then green beans on the end.The beans are blooming and the tomatoes have little green fruit on them. He's thrilled!

This photo shows part of the first and second one. The second one is lower in profile. He has green onions on one end, then two cucumber hills and four rows of peas with marigolds on the end. We went out last night and started with weeding. Ryan picks one tiny weed at a time so I end up helping of course, but by the time it was done he'd spent a good half hour in the fresh air.

He lovingly watered his produce and then we picked a few of his onions. He must have asked me five times "Are you cleaning my onions?" or "Are those nice onions?" etc. It was precious! He kept coming into the kitchen and looking at them as though he couldn't quite believe he'd grown them. He called his grandmother and told her, he talked to his great aunt about it. He had stories to tell. I LOVE that about the horticultural therapy which has tons of physical, emotional and psychological benefits (I wrote an extensive article on it once for my column) but it has a social component. Ryan has a common language with other gardeners and farmers. It gives him a reason to pick up the phone and talk to family members. It's awesome on too many levels to go into here.

Strait-Edge Construction did the beds for us last fall. I recommend them for this type of job too. The stones are secured with pins so the beds don't start sagging or settling in a weird configuration. 

Today we're planting more onions and his second batch of radishes are up so we'll look at those. He also slept with his window open a couple of inches last night again because of the security fence! I didn't realize how much he worried about it until now. He sleeps better because of  the fresh air too. So many benefits from a simple fence and some gardening beds. Every day we discover more benefits!

That's it for me today,

Have a good one .... grill a hamburger for me tonight! 

Much love and joy,

Karen