Our Garden

We managed to grow a garden this year for the first time ever! I have tried several times to even keep a house plant alive, I never seemed to water it right. Always too much or not enough=dead plants. So L handled the initial planting and watering, and once it was established a bit then I dared to come near it. Here is our first sprout(zucchini) we grew.

The day we took this picture we went to my Grandpa O's house. We told he and Grandma about our first sprout of our garden, we were so excited that we finally got something to grow...until Grandpa showed us his plants. He had planted them roughly at the same time and his garden was jungle-like! I wasn't too jealous, though, because I was just happy that we didn't waste all that time and water for nothing at all to come up. But before we knew it, we had things like this growing:

Now we have all the zucchini and yellow squash we can eat, and tons of butternut and watermelon coming soon!

We had also planted cucumbers, which apparently make very tasty plants for squirrels... so we were left with a bare row of dirt in the middle of the garden. So I took a few seeds from a butternut squash I was cooking and literally stuck them into the ground right out of the squash. My green thumb must have finally developed, because they grew and filled in every spare inch of the garden! We have just picked the first of them. I highly recommend attempting a garden, it has been such fun for our whole family, Son is learning so much and will eat anything that comes out of a garden, ours or someone else's. Not to mention the sprinklers are great fun!

One more funny anecdote: L worked very hard prepping the soil to plant our garden. He has a tendency never to buy the right amounts of things for projects... he either runs out and has to go back to the store 5 times, or he buys way too much of things. Case in point: manure. We were running errands as a family with both cars on one warm afternoon. One of the errands was buying manure for our garden prep, another was getting the tires rotated. L bought 12 huge bags of manure and loaded them into the back of our newish Rodeo. We walked around the shopping center for a while after that because the tire rotation took quite a bit longer than we anticipated. After a while we decided to go ahead and take the kids home in the rodeo and leave Luis behind to bring the car when it was finished, they were getting cranky and it was getting pretty hot out. As we approached the parking spot where we left the Rodeo, we discovered what 12 bags of manure smell like after heating up in an enclosed car for a hour. The poor kids had to ride home 15 minutes in that stench...UGH! I swear it took a couple months before the Rodeo was back to its nice coconut tree smell again. After all of that, we now have EIGHT fifty pound bags of @#%! left over still smelling up the backyard when the wind blows just right. The good news is, it is not going to go bad and smell any worse. And, of course, in case we have a worldwide manure shortage, we are COVERED!