We’ve spent the last couple of weeks tearing up half of our lawn to put in our vegetable garden. We’ve planted several kinds of tomatoes including Sun Gold, Amish Paste and several varieties that Brent’s Latvian grandmother saves from seeds; also red bell peppers, zucchini, crookneck summer squash, pickling cucumbers, state half-runner bush beans, purple pole beans, carrots, onions, and tons of basil. We also planted experimental huckleberry and strawberry patches with teeny tiny plants that may produce fruit in 10 years or so. We still have to put in our pumpkins and gourds, cilantro, lemongrass, and caraway.
We have to admit that seeing the photos by the amazing master gardener bloggers here at GRIT has left us feeling a little intimidated, especially when we realize that we’ve already lost half the directions to the seeds we started. But then we remind ourselves that we are complete novices, anything we grow will taste good to our family, and lots of other gardeners don’t have to invest so much of their prime-gardening time trying to convince their toddler to wear pants.
So we have been gearing our garden toward the things we know about ourselves 1) we have a lot of energy in the spring and it tends to dwindle as it gets hotter 2) we hate math and 3) we are a little bit lazy. We are trying to avoid later chaos by using tomato cages and we’re mulching everything in sight with straw so hopefully we don’t have to weed as much. We are also planting all our climbing vegetables conveniently near to the ugly chain-link fence in our yard.
You probably won’t see many perfect gardening pictures on our blog this summer, but we’ll try to keep you updated on our good-enough gardening attempts. Happy planting!
