How Does Your Garden Grow?

In an attempt to save a little dough and to feel some amount of control over something, my mother in law and I have decided to grow our own food in the backyard. This will be garden number two for me...I'm not really sure how many for Marianne. This has been a very long process. You see, first we had to think about whether we wanted the responsibility of a garden. Should it be organic? Should it be a raised bed? Exactly how big should it be? Will the romping dogs and mischievous rats stay away from our precious plants?

Then they became a little more direct. Like: Bricks cost that much!? The plants cost that much?! We have to have soil additives!? And they cost how much?!

After about one month of diligently studying the vegetables we wanted to grow, waking up in the wee hours of the morning to listen to Bob Webster's radio show about plants, debating back and forth about how much we want to spend and scratching off dates that we might have time to buy the dirt, we set off last weekend to pursue our dreams of growing a green thumb.

This is what I have learned about building a garden: It takes a lot of time, a truck with an empty bed, two hunky guys from Lowes to load cinder blocks, muscles of your own when you get those cinder blocks home, two trips to Lowes because only 26 bricks can fit in the truck, 4 trips to the dirt store, gas to feed the truck after lugging around all that extra weight, an air pump for the flat wheelbarrow tire, several bags of soil enhancers, lots of drinking water and an extra trip to the garden store because apparently one of the soil enhancers cannot survive when left in the heat of the truck overnight.

This weekend, we skipped off to the garden store and gathered our plants. We collected cucumbers, carrot seeds, onion slips, squash, eggplant, strawberries, bush beans, english peas, and tomatoes.

After lots of hemming and hawing about where everything should be placed, this is what we came up with:

The cucumbers are on the side so they will vine out, the peas are in the middle so they can vine up, the squash have lots of space so they can grow big, the strawberries are hanging in an upside down hanger so they will grow down and the eggplant has not yet been planted- so until they are, I guess they will not grow at all. The flowers are strategically placed around the outside to discourage bugs from entering the premises, and will soon have carrots and onions as their friendly border neighbors. All in all, I think it looks pretty good. Not bad for two full weekends of hard, backbreaking work.

I am very excited to see that I might just be able to grow strawberries this year. I have heard they are hard to grow. I know that no matter how hard they are to grow, it wont be as hard as putting this all together.

Don't let the tired face fool you...he didn't do anything to help. No- he just lounged around and watched me sweat, groan and toil under the sun...Which he seems to be enjoying entirely too much.