My Pride and Joy!

There is a lot of things I should post about that has happened in the last few weeks- 4th of July(which was fun, but wore me out more than Christmas), Family reunion(again fun, but tiring), Matt's new job(which isn't going to be fun for me, but I suppose I will write about that another time), and updates about Carter's arm(looking good- finally), but I would rather right about my pride and joy, My Garden!!!!

I grew my very first garden when we lived in Louisville. It consisted of like 13 tomato plants, 3 pepper plants, green beans and watermelon. It all grew wonderfully, except for the green beans and the watermelon, which did grow great, but the bunnies that lived in my yard ate any of the plants fruit, which left me with just the plant. Anyways, but I rarely watered it and it all grew like crazy. It was wonderful. And I loved it! I would go out morning and evening and fawn over it. I would count all the new tomatoes. I am sure Carter, who I would drag out there with me thought I was nuts. But you get that way about it, or at least I do.

So that was like 3 or 4 summers ago. Mhe summer after my Louisville garden we moved from an apartment in Boise to a house sometime in May and I was pregnant and didn't want to worry about gardening. Then last year, again we moved into our house in May and while I wasn't pregnant I felt like I had enough going on with moving in that I all I did was plant a few tomato plants in a grassless spot in the yard. I didn't stake them and I didn't water them, or at least very little. I did at some point dump some Miracle Grow on them and while the plants did grew tons, they produced very little fruit. This year, I was going to do it and do it right.

So in April, I signed up for a beginning gardening class taught by the extension office here. I felt like if I was going to put a lot of money and time into this garden, I need to know how to grow a garden in Utah, with its lack of water, crappy soil and weird bugs, but no bunnies- at least not in my yard. Anyways..... The class, while not super cheap, lasted 3 weeks and provided me with a wealth of information about how to make my garden grow!!!!

So, I got my wonderful husband to dig up the area in which I wanted the garden to be. Then we removed all the grass by hand, shaking out the soil- that was a nightmare. Next we put fertilizer on the soil and rototillered it to death! (Matt did all that part!) Then to get the soil to the right temperature to plant, we staked plastic over the area for a couple of weeks. We(Matt, with a little bit of my help) dug out trenches, so that I could flood them with water and develop a strong root system in the plants.

Finally, I planted!!!! I researched out all the plants I wanted and what kind would grow best in my cruddy soil. I planted 9 tomato plants- 1 Brandywine, 2 Early Girl, 1 Big Boy, 2 Roma, and 3 Celebrity- 3 red pepper plants, 1 zucchini, 1 cucumber, about 40 pole green beans, which I used my back fence which is rod iron as my poles, which I thought was just ingenious, if I do say so myself. And then I also planted about 40 plants of corn in 4 rows!!!!! The corn is so exciting to watch grow! It is so big, some of it is at my chest. I planted the beans and corn in 2 groups, with plantings 2 weeks apart, so that I wouldn't get a million ears of corn, or a bushel of beans all at the same time.

And tonight I picked my first zucchini! It was soo exciting! I don't know what I am going to do with it yet, honestly, I mean I will eat it, but I don't know how.

What is funny about a garden is that you think you will save money by growing your own food... HA!!! We have spent soo much money on that thing, not including my class, that I think I could buy all the food I am getting plus a bunch more for what I have spent on it. However, it is a good skill to have and now that we are at this point, it is soo exciting to watch it grow. It is a test in patience and trial and error as I am learning how best to water, weed, etc.... Maybe one day I will turn into a real expert of a gardener.