Mary Mary quite conrary...

How does your garden grow?

Well, since you asked. Quite well, thankyouverymuch!

A little background. My dad and stepmom have had a garden since, well, I can't remember when they didn't. Their garden has slowly grown over the years though to not only get larger and larger, but also grow more and more different veggies. It's really fun to go visit them and see their garden. Unfortunatly, we only get to see it once a year...BOO! And don't really get the fun of watching it go from tiny little sprouts to huge plants with big yummy veggies that we can pick and eat right there.

I guess I've always kind of wanted to have a garden that we can tend and watch grow. I just don't like to water it and go out in the 1000+ degree weather with 2000+ heat index and sweat unitl my body is out of sweat to weed it. But I digress. I do love gardening veggies, not flowers mind you since I can't seem to keep them alive. I also love to cook with them during the summer when they are ripe.

Until the summer is over and I've eaten approximately 1500 tiny little tomatoes and have had my fill since no one else in my house will come within 100 feet of a tiny tomato.

Again, I digress. Last summer I decided to plant some tomato plants. The problem? I planted 6, since the package had 6 plants in it...not just 1. I also planted a strawberry plan that produced all of 3 itty bitty strawberries that I cut into 4 itty bittyer pieces to try. They weren't even tastes. It was also at the bottom of our yard, quite a ways away, down the slope, and hear the wooded area near where snakes may or may come into the backyard...no thanks! Anyway...my tomato plants produced sooo many tomatoes that in Feburary on our 1 snow day here, after 7 months of no watering, no weeding, and absolutly no attention, they were still producing tomatoes. They were the plants that would not DIE already! I was done with them. BUT, the strawberry plant that was supposed to come back the year after, had been weed eated off to never return again...BOOO!

(This years' garden)

This spring, for my Mother's Day gift, my mom helped me to plant a garden right off of our porch so that I had some hope of keeping it up, watering, weeding, you know all the kind of things gardens need. Also, so that I can see out of the windown when it needs water and weeding and HAVE to go out and do it.

We planted 1, count it 1, tomato plant, 1 pepper plant, 1 flower that she gave my little princess (just for some extra color), 1 basil plant (so that when we do get tomatoes, all I have to get is some good motzerella), and 1 cilantro plant (for the endless salsa that I'm going to make). My little garden spot is just that, little. But it's a great little garden and I plan on making this my garden every summer for the rest of our time in this house, however long that will be.

(look very closely and you can see 2 tiny tomatos)

Yesterday, after our 1 day of rain in the last 6 months, I decided that since the weeds were just as large as the plants, I should weed the garden. This proved much easier since we had had rain. You see dry, parched, aired, thirsty "dirt" doesn't like to release anything, weed or otherwise. And weeding when it's not wet is near impossible without feeling like you are going to loose your fingertips.

I was able to weed the entire garden within about 15 minutes. AND I found a use for our lovely yellow metal dumptrucks, other than putting your 5 and 6 year olds in them and running them down the hill. They were lovely collectable containers to then dump over the fence into said wooded area that may or maynot be where the snakes come from properlly dispose of.

So there you have it, our little garden for the summer of 2011. Of whom, I'll probably have to eat every veggie harvested from it since not one other person in my house will eat anything of which I've planted, gown, and sweated over the weeds. Grown on, little veggies, grow on!