Guest Bloggers, Gardening, and Green Thumbs!! Oh my!!

Girlfriends With Grace is excited to introduce you to Teresa, our guest blogger for the day. Melinda and I met Teresa in our Moms Morning group a few years ago. If you are fortunate enough to know Teresa, you know that she is one of those women that seems to be able to do EVERYTHING - cooking, decorating, crafting - and she does them all well. Teresa is also one of the nicest people you will ever meet. She usually has a smile on her face and is always willing to lend a hand when needed. She is a great Girlfriend!! That is precisely why we asked her to be our guest blogger today and to share with you her adventures in gardening!!

New Beginnings

Spring is my favorite season. Everything is new. It doesn’t smell like “snow” anymore. It smells like dirt and earthworms (yuck! Although I do appreciate the work they do in my garden). Forsythias, daffodils, pansies and tulips are blooming, the trees are getting buds and there’s a lot more sunshine! The world is waking up (as am I) and getting ready for a new growing season.

I love to grow things. I have been growing things in yards where I’ve lived for as long as I can remember. At home growing up, we always had a huge garden full of vegetables. I have to admit this garden wasn’t my favorite thing back then. My sis and I had to weed it. Then we had to help freeze and can it. When you are 9 or 10 years old, the rows look a mile long. I know I spent a lot of time daydreaming and falling asleep in the rows instead of weeding. It’s a lot of work when you’re a kid and you’d much rather be riding your bike or reading or just about anything other than being stuck in the garden on a hot day.

Gardening is not without its up and downs, trials and errors. I wanted to try to be “green” this year by growing seedlings in empty egg shells. When the baby plant is ready to be transplanted in the garden, you just crunch the shell a bit so the roots can get out and plunk it in the ground (and the dirt absorbs calcium from the eggshell). Easy peasy, right? Wrong! Those weebles were wobbling all over the place. Thank goodness for the empty egg carton to help keep them upright. They were hard to fill with dirt and hard to water. The water kept pooling on top of the dirt. A good friend of mine who is the queen of all things growing gave me a good tip: Dampen the dirt first before putting it in your growing container. The water will be absorbed right away when you try to water. Brilliant! I will still try to be green about growing my plants, but the rest will be sown either right in the garden or started in those little peat pellets that swell when you put water on them. Henceforth, eggshells will be rinsed, crunched and thrown in the garden to turn into compost.


These are my baby plants. It’s very exciting to start growing things when it’s still cold out. I do not own any grow lights to help these babies along. My grow light is the sun and my big east facing window. I have my babies on a bench covered with a towel, for leakage protection of course, and they grow there. Every morning their little leaves are stretched toward the window so I have to give the containers a 180 degree turn so that they grow straight. I usually buy tomato transplants from the local garden store, but this year I wanted to try a few varieties that the garden store doesn’t carry so that’s why I started my own.

Have you been thinking about starting a garden? My advice is to start small, maybe with one or two different veggies or flowers, grow what you love to look at or eat, don’t be afraid to make mistakes and try new things. Most of all, don’t forget to water.

Your gardening girlfriend,
Teresa