Tea and Sweatpants...

My friend Lauren recommended a wonderful book called Made from Scratch (sorry teachers, couldn't find the underline key) by Jenna Woginrich.  I read this book in about two days and LOVED it!  I told her that I started gardening last year and she wanted to know how it went.  I thought all of you would get a good laugh from my hard work last year.  

First of all I must say that I am not very good at seeing projects through to the end.  I love starting them and seeing them begin but I tend to loose passion about half way through.  This even included books, I only recently have been finishing them all the way to the end.  

My hubby helped with the hard stuff like tilling the dirt and building a box.  I have a beautiful slightly raised bed that measures about 2x16 ft.  I got out graph paper and did my research and planned how many plants would fit and in what order they should go.  I didn't however do enough research and here was the result:

1. I planted my tomato plants on the south end instead of the north thus causing them to cast shadows over all my peppers.  

2.  Not one single pepper fully ripened and each plant only produced about one.

3. All the labels for the starts I bought on sale had been mixed up and it resulted in 3 of the same plant instead of a variety of 4 kinds of tomato like I had hoped and one of them turned out to be a watermelon plant. 

4. Spinach is the absolute easiest thing to grow here in Oregon.  Just threw those seeds in the ground and watched it grow!

5. Grew lots of flat leaf parsley but only used a tinge of it...didn't really think that one through, turned out to be a waste of ground space.

6. Don't look at corn starts mid summer on sale and assume they will just grow!  I did that and non of them produced anything, just grew really tall.

7. I plan on growing my own starts from seed this year to save tons of money.

8. Oh yeah, strawberry plants don't really produce strawberries the first year.

9.  Nick is much better about watering my plants than I am.  Nearly fried half of them to death, surely would have lost the whole garden if Nick hadn't watered it for me.

10. Oh yeah, that watermelon plant, didn't get a single watermelon from it!

Needless to say I learned a lot last year and have high hopes for this summer.  I have a neighbor who is a wonderful gardener and she was a huge help last year. I think I need to be asking her more questions though:) 

My plans for this year are to again only garden in my one bed.  Also, I am going to try really hard to start from seeds.  I do plan on falling back on professionals if I need to buy starts though.  I am going to be really smart about what I plant so that I can care more deeply for my crop so it will actually be worth my time and money.  I really am excited about having my boys help where they can and watch them learn about the Earth in a new way.