Gardening

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It is so exciting to see things popping up in our garden. Every day it seems that we find a new plant or two. Today some more croockneck squash is up – day before yesterday it was pumpkin. Hopefully the cucumbers will be up soon too.

We bought more plants this year than we ever have. There’s 22 broccoli (and some even have little broccoli buds already!), 17 tomato plants (1 died), 9 green bell peppers, 2 watermelon, and 1 peppermint. S wanted to grow the melons, so we bought a couple plants for him. Both of the pots had 3-4 plants each, so we’ll probably end up with far more than we can eat. That’s ok though.

Everything else we’re growing from seed. We bought corn, beans, pickling cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, sugar pumpkins, and beets (for my father-in-law). Then I dug out (I know, bad pun, haha) some seeds we didn’t plant last year. We put those in more out-of-the-way places in case they don’t come up. S and I planted carrots, regular cucumbers, and spinach today. It’s too late to plant the lettuce so we’ll wait until later in the season for that.

We’re wanting to do a second planting of things later too – broccoli, corn, beans, spinach, and the lettuce. We’ll see how that goes.

This is by far the biggest garden we’ve ever planted. Stephen’s time is limited, so he tills up the ground and I plant. S helps me and C watches from the stroller. It’s fun.

S likes to “help” but it’s a challenge since he isn’t always careful where he walks. He won’t learn if we don’t teach him though, so I let him try. And he enjoys it. That boy is SO proud of his watermelon – I can’t wait to see how he gets when they actually have melons on the vines.

Stephen also tilled up a spot for me to plant a flower and herb garden. I had some sunflowers in the corner of the vegetable garden that were getting really crowded, so I dug them up and moved them. When I got them off freecycle the bunch was football-sized; now there was enough to plant a good 8-foot row of them! They will look so pretty. I planted lavender in front of that (next to my mint) and the spinach is in the very front. It’ll probably look kind of odd, but for now I was just planting where we had room. I’d till more ground for flowers myself but I can’t control the tiller well enough. So if it looks too weird, I’ll move them next year.

So we’ll see how things do this year. Lord willing, there won’t be such a drought this summer and we’ll be able to put a lot up for the winter.