My Garden

Yes, I am well aware that this was a summer garden and it is now the middle of November...

but better late than never? For some reason life has just gotten busy this fall and blogging fell down on my list of important things to do. And I have realized that once I am blogging at least somewhat regularly, then it is like a habit and I am often thinking of things to blog, but when I let it go for a long time then it's harder to pick it back up. So, maybe this will give me a kick start to start blogging again. Many of you probably know that my mom and sister and her family are across the ocean from us in Africa, and my Mom enjoys keeping up with my blog so she can see pictures of the kids and keep up with some of our daily activities, so Mom, I will try harder! :)

I enjoyed my garden this year. My raised bed worked great, and helped so much with weeding, feeding, watering, and keeping kids off the plants. And it looked so much nicer! I got lots of good cucumbers this year, a few green beans, green peppers, yellow and red bell peppers, and tomatoes (mostly cherry and grape tomatoes). I planted yellow squash and zucchini, but they didn't grow - they got some kind of bug or disease. I also tried watermelon and cantelope. My watermelon never got very big. I did get one cantelope, but that was it. Anyway, with it being only my second garden I was quite pleased with all that I learned and the success I had.

My Vegetable Garden (So Far!)

Last year I had my first garden. I pretty much just stuck some plants in the ground (although I did add a bit to the soil), and it was very haphazard. I didn't even make nice neat rows for everything. It was fun, though, and a good learning experience. I got some crooked neck squash and quite a few tomatoes. This year I have read up some more on vegetable gardening (although I have a ton left to learn) and decided to make raised vegetable beds. We have only gotten one done so far, and will probably just make another one as we have time and energy this summer. This is the back corner of our yard. When my Mom was visiting she and Thomas helped me clear out the area- it was mostly weeds, but also some grass creeping back that way. So, this is what I started with:

In the meantime, I planted some seeds in starter peat squares since it was time to plant. This year I planted cantelope (we just dried these seeds from a cantelope we had!), green peppers, cherry-sized tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, green beans and cucumbers. My tomatoes didn't come up for a while, but now have finally come up. We'll see if they end up surviving. I went to my mother-in-law's to pick up the children one day and I mentioned that my green peppers weren't growing, and next thing I knew we were downtown Bethune (SC) picking out some plants. I ended up getting a bunch of pepper plants (including a red and yellow one) and 2 strawberry plants and Nathaniel eyed a watermelon plant, so I said "Why not!" I may have gotten in over my head - we'll see!

We had a bunch of these bricks that lined the lawn area and separated it from the natural (pine trees) areas in our back yard when we moved in. There was something about the backyard that I didn't really like, but couldn't really put my finger on for a while. I finally realized that I felt like our yard was too divided - that there were too many "sections" of the yard. So, I took the bricks off of one side, and I like it much better. I realized the bricks would be great for raised vegetable beds! This way the kids don't walk on the plants or soil, we put in some good soil for the plants, and it looks nicer. This one is 23 feet long!


So today I FINALLY got my plants into the vegetable bed. It is exciting to see it filled with plants and I can't wait to see how my garden does this year!