My Garden

I hope this one doesn't bore you. I thought I'd give a shout-out to my garden. First: the background. I've tried gardens on and off through out the years. I learned with my first one I am great at planting and picking, but stinky at the maintaining part. That means pretty much the weeds always took over. Talk about joy-kill.

Then a couple years ago a man in our ward (who is a Master Gardner for fun) started a class. It was the basics and just some things he's learned over the years. I learned SO much! It gave me the hope and encouragement to try again. The last two gardens have been successes! So here we are now...

First, we have awesome soil. We are on a prior river bed so we have rock, but I credit great soil for most of the success. This is Dee plowing our garden to get it started. We also have lots of space, which also helps.

This year we built some seed shelves to try and grow everything by seed. Again, the Master Gardner's suggestion and idea. I'll admit I became a major geek this year with plant starts. I loved doing it and was so excited to see them all come up! Next year I'm going to start even earlier, and more. This is a shot of Ellie in front of the new shelves. To the right is with the lights and plastic covering on.

This is the first seedling that came up for me. Like a proud parent, I tell ya. The picture on the right is when we went to plant them outside and the roots were 2 feet long! Amazing!

The thing I had the most success with were sunflowers. I planted them around our pool, in the garden, across the fence. I planted a variety of colors and sizes and they all were amazing! The one Ellie is in front of were 12 feet high, but my tallest one was 13 1/2 feet!

So the moral of the story is don't give up. Have fun. Don't get discouraged. My tomatoes were pretty pathetic this year, but I had strawberries, onions, garlic, cukes, pumpkins and zucchini. I'm getting ready to plant my fall garden (first time for me). Apparently here you can grown an over-winter garden which was pretty mind blowing to a gal from colder climates. Broccoli, garlic, onions, califlower, basil, cilantro... we'll have to see how it goes.

Oh, and don't forget to water...