Garden in Process

Cleaning out my behind the curtain blog stuff tonight and ran across this half-written post from mid-April which four months later I now find hysterical and I hope it gives you a chuckle.  Many things did not survive our damp cold Spring, but here is a photo of how our little kitchen garden looked a few weeks ago...those are the tomatoes on the left, boy did they ever take off.  I have some work to do along that fence and some fall planting to do.  I'm thinking about a bench for sitting somewhere here, maybe a little potting bench, maybe a water feature of some sort.  Next year, we are replacing the sunflowers with raspberries and it will all truly be an edible garden.

**beginning of draft post**


I am not a gardener.

I am not being self-deprecating.  Dirt and plants scare me.  Sort of.  How does a little seed know that it is supposed to be an eggplant and not a gerbera daisy???  Sometimes I think I like the idea of gardening more than the actual gardening.

We are currently working on finishing the garden space that we started last summer.  We've taken basically the South side of our house and hubby built three 4 x 8 raised beds in the center.  There are plum trees and blueberry bushes and we are working on the rest. There will be giant sunflowers and lots of wildflowers, climbing hydrangea on the fence, and we are looking for a fig tree.  Today, we planted the raised beds.  One of them was already about half full of strawberries from last year's planting.  It's only year two for two of the beds and year one for the third bed.  We are still amending the soil.

The boys were occupied in a rock moving operation and my husband was digging out beds and figuring out where the borders of our paths would be and I sort of found myself alone with the three beds and a dozen packets of seeds.  uh....okay.  Some of them were to be 1/4" deep and an inch apart, some 1" deep and 6" apart and so on and so forth...I sort of figured out which plants in which beds (different looking leaves turned out to be the decider here so I wouldn't get confused.)  I started to divide the beds into rows at which point my husband took the rake out of my hand and sort of built raised rows.  He then saw how I was planting in the rows and suggested I make "furrows" in the rows.  Furrows?  What the hell is a furrow?  You mean like my brow at this moment?

I am not known as a patient woman.  It is not my gift.  It is hard for me to believe that I have to wait seven to ten days to see what pops up out of the ground.  Right now, it's just brown beds of dirt.  I drew a map of where everything was planted so we would know what was coming up where. I'm looking forward to seeing how our harvest turns out.  I'm still not a gardener. Planted today:

pumpkins
carrots
radishes
arugula
swiss chard
mixed lettuces
cucumbers
bell peppers
snap peas

We still have to plant eggplant, melons, tomatoes, zucchini, fennel and some misc items that I am going to start in "Jiffy" pots in the kitchen window (and maybe leave there!)  Haha - wish me luck!