Garden

During my childhood, my mom planted a garden any time she could find a patch dirt. We also had several summers of huge gardens out at my grandparents farm. So many happy memories are from sitting in the garden with either my grandma or my mom while they watered and weeded and listening to stories or playing pictionary in the dirt. As we grew older, my sister and I took over the farm garden (with help from my Dad), and we took our produce to town to sell. I'm sure we were hot and bored and cranky some (or a lot) of the time. But, I only remember it as fun.

Anyway, since being a 'grown-up', I've been wanting to start gardening again. I'd never had much success growing things on my own, but the cost of produce, my desire to find some productive hobbies, and my husband's amazing ability to build pretty much anything, brought about our family's first garden :) (The green been trellis has been expanded quite a bit since this picture):

We have herbs (basil, mint, chamomile, and the now-dead cilantro), strawberries, cucumbers, string beans, peppers, tomatoes, onions, squash and zucchini. I feel very attached to all my little plants and get very agitated when they are not thriving. The onions and cilantro seem to be a failed attempt, and we've had some very strange results from our squash and zucchini experiment. We planted them in last summer's plastic pool...and as you can see in the picture - one plant took over. Who knew squash plants were territorial??

We've been enjoying lots of tomatoes and eagerly awaiting enough string beans to cook more than a bowl full (although the one bowl we did have was totally yummy!). I have no idea what all to do with the basil - so I've been just tossing it into to stuff randomly. I'm sure that there are a lot of great ways to use the mint, too, and I have a LOT of it, but I just look at it mostly.

Here's B with her sunflower plants. We planted them in with the banana plants we thought (incorrectly) we had killed this winter.

Yay garden!