The Gardening Has Begun

For a few days now, I’ve been all stressed out about our future gardening endeavors. Laura makes fun of me, but my stress isn’t unfounded. The fact is, I’m not sure I’ve ever planted a piece of fruit or a vegetable successfully in my life. I’ve certainly tried, that’s for sure. But as far as heading outside to pluck a few tomatoes off a plant every morning – nope. That’s never happened.

I remember a few years back when we purchased a nice full strawberry plant. My parents came to visit and one of our activities was to show them a local farm. While there, we got suckered into picking up one of the largest and most promising looking plants – with little mini strawberries hanging all over the place. I can recall thinking of how much fun it would be eating all those red ripe strawberries every day. Unfortunately, the eating part of that story never happened. The squirrels or mice or bears had their way with them first. Something did, because all I know is that there were fewer and fewer little mini strawberries every time I looked at that plant. It did last until the end of the season though and after the season was through, I chucked the whole thing in the woods.

We even tried to get tomatoes to grow one year. I can remember back to when I was a kid – my mother ended up with big huge tomatoes for what seemed like an entire summmer. She grew them in 5 gallon buckets, you know, like the rest of the world does. I even had a better setup than that, but our dog ended up plucking, one by one, every single red tomato we grew. By the time we discovered that she was the culprit, it was too late.

Seriously, I’m just sick and tired of hearing successful gardening stories from people. And since we’ve somehow ended up living someplace where the growing season is like 9 months long, I figured we should take advantage of it.

We’ve been running over to Lowe’s quite a bit lately. Not too much, but just enough to gather a few bags of dirt and a couple of plants here and there. While it seems simple and even though we’re at the beginning of things, I am slowly becoming a little nervous about our lack of organization. I keep comparing gardening to owning a fish tank. Once you enter the store, you lose all sense of rationality and start piling everything into the cart. The dream of having a beautiful fish tank, or in this case, growing your own food is too much for the beginner to handle. But we’ll get the hang of things soon enough, I guess.

I took a bunch of pictures today to show you where we’re at. We’ve got two main areas so far – one in the front of the house for colorful, flower type plants and one in the back of the house for vegetables and stuff like that. I’m sure we’ll be shuffling buckets back and forth if recent history is any predictor of the future. I honestly don’t know what I’m doing because more and more seeds keep coming in the mail. Laura is taking care of that. It’s just happening kind of fast.

We’ve decided that planting in pots is the way to go around here. I don’t have a rototiller and ordering a dump truck full of manure and top soil really doesn’t make all that much sense. Picking up one or two bags of garden or potting soil is probably easiest. I even ordered 26 three gallon and 10 seven gallon black flimsy nursery planting buckets from Amazon last night. They are less than a dollar a piece and should help out tremendously.

Here’s our inventory so far and here’s what I think I just took pictures of. We did get a shipment of herb seeds this afternoon, but I’ll include them in one of my following posts because I haven’t explored them yet.

– One Spartan Blueberry bush
– One Double Red Althea bush
– Multiple Avocado plants
– One Knockout Rose bush
– Multiple Lily of the Valley plants
– Multiple Beefsteak and Red Cherry Tomato seedlings (hopefully)

I also took some pictures of an open bag of Scotts garden soil and my ten pound bag of Jobe’s Organics all-purpose fertilizer. That was just for good measure. When I look back at this post, wondering what I had at one point, I’ll know.

I think I may begin documenting my what happens with our gardening. That should be fun. That way, all of you out there with tips can offer up some comments in the section below. Thanks ahead of time.