Results tagged “garden” from in bloom

While we waited to close on our new house, I was driven by this obsession to start planting things in the front yard, in preparation for our ownership.  Scott seemed to think that the previous owners might not appreciate my proactive approach, and I managed to wait until the keys were in our hands before I actually did anything to alter the garden.

The first things I planted that very first night were some ornamental sweet potatoes my grandmother gave me, which I positioned along the fences in the back yard.  Second, I think, were some orange and yellow bulbines, brought from the garden I'd cultivated at the little duplex in central Austin, where I lived for five years. 

The next week, as I waited for a service call, I started my planting in the fenced-in garden.  The peanuts were planted first in mid-June, and by July 4th, we'd added pumpkins, watermelon, gourds, and beans.  July 15th, we added corn, and I planted some heirloom tomatoes in a seeding tray (seen here).

To be fair, neither of us has much practical vegetable gardening experience.  Aside from some knowledge of how to pull baby carrots, the only things I have any experience growing are tomatoes.  Scott's family actually does a fair bit of gardening, but that's all well above the 49th Parallel, so most of what he knows doesn't apply here in central Texas.  So this is our learning year, and while we won't pretend that we weren't disappointed when our watermelon plants vanished entirely after a promising start, or that our pumpkin vines never bore fruit despite growing ten feet long and blooming all over the place, we're willing to chalk up our failures in the vegetable garden as a learning experience and move on from there.  In our defense, we didn't get to start planting until well into the summer, and this year was rather bizarre from a weather standpoint, with enormous amounts of rainfall for the first few months we were here.  Ultimately, the weeds were growing faster than we could pull them, and we fell behind a bit in our cultivation.

I have harvested a couple dozen green beans, and a few older pods for seeds for next spring.  We have one heirloom tomato plant on target to (hopefully) produce some fruit for us this fall, and our cucumber vine has sprouted a few small, funny-shaped spiky cucumbers.  And now we've cleaned out part of our garden to attempt some cooler-weather plants like broccoli, onions, and lettuce, which I planted yesterday.  For this new planting, I demarcated four square feet of space, staking and marking it off to try my hand at some square-foot gardening.  I should be able to weed four square feet of garden, and it will be easier to cover that amount when the weather gets colder.  I'll add on when we're ready to plant carrot seeds and whatever else we plan to put there.

Gardening is much like life, isn't it?  We can act strategically to improve our gardens' fortune with careful tending and attentiveness, but we have to accept with grace the factors which we cannot control.  Fortune still has much to say about the future of my fall garden, but I'm fortunate in that I can begin the cycle again from scratch in a few months.