My Garden Today...

My garden will soon be producing more produce than my family can eat, I daresay. However, nothing is ready to eat now. My friends are telling me how they are "up to their ears in zucchini," or how "it's so great to go out to the garden and pick my dinner." Well, I guess I'm behind. All I've been able to eat is lettuce, and a few peas (enough for my 7-year-old to have one helping...). Well, I'm behind, but I guess its coming. Here are some things I've learned:

1. Peas are vines...and need something to climb or else they wind up in a tangled mess.

2. Carrots have to be thinned out....or else they grow no bigger than a fat toothpick.

3. Tomatoes need support as high as my head...and they'd still probably fall over the side.

4. Herbs need a lot of sunlight or they won't grow.

5. It is necessary to wash all the bugs out of the lettuce before serving it.

6. I absolutely love to grow a garden. :)

Look At My Garden!

Forgive me, but I had to do a blog entry just to show off my garden! I've been having a great time this year and have been learning a lot. My garden, which was a tangled, weeded, mess when we first moved here, gets better and better each year.

The only place I have to plant a garden is a sloped edge of the back yard that we had to clear of dead trees. So, once it was cleared, Dave built me a retaining wall and hauled in some nice soil and told me to make it nice. I decided to resort back to my childhood memories of my mother working in her vegetable garden. I revelled in the memory of going to the tomato patch with the hose and a salt shaker and gobbling up the sun-warmed, ripe, homegrown tomatoes. There is no other taste like that in the world. So, I was resolved to have vegetable garden that would make my mother proud.

The first year, I didn't realize tomatoes needed support, and that I should grow squashes away from cucumbers. I ended up with rotten tomatoes growing on the ground and cucumbers that looked like uglifruit. I lived and learned.

So, having practiced a couple of years, I have a garden that, even though it's not perfect, I'm very proud of. Here's some pictures of the process. Most things were started from seed in the house at the end of March.