I have loved the idea of gardening for years and years and years.
When we got married, I started small with a few potted plants in our apartment. Over the years I have killed more tiny potted plants than I care to remember. The carnage is overwhelming.
This year my children decided to take down their play structure and plant a garden. Actually they decided to plant a garden, but the only viable place was where the play structure stood. So they decided the structure must go.
After we unbuilt it and gave it to some friends for their hobby farm business, we successfully grew an entire yard full of unidentifiable weeds.
We followed sage organic advice (though not environmentally sound advice) and covered the area with plastic in order to “burn” the weeds to death. Apparently we are growing some mutant variety because the plastic acted as some sort of green house and after four weeks the plants now stand over a foot tall under the plastic. And we still do not have a garden.
On Sunday we finally made a trip out to T&T Seeds and found they still had tables full of seedlings in their greenhouse. Everyone choose two plants. We came home, hand-pulled the mutant weeds in part of the garden area, and plunked the little vegetables plants into the soil. Now we have a garden.
In a few months we will hopefully harvest some tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash. Yesterday we had two kinds of fresh herbal pesto. And the front lawn now sports some beautiful plants that apparently are supposed to survive more than one season! It is all very exciting.
Of course one of the ornamental sunflowers (apparently not all sunflower plants have sunflower seeds and one should read the little plastic stick tags very carefully) has already succumbed to the ravages of life here in this harsh and dangerous place. We propped it up with a stick, but survival is looking very uncertain.
I should probably start some sort of betting pool where you can all choose to guess how many of the 28 plants will survive this whole experiment. The winner could come for dinner (although we cannot guarantee that any fresh garden vegetables will be served.)
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