Green gardens grow

We promised to tell you more about our garden, and we figured we have made you wait long enough. This is the story of our first garden. It actually starts way back when we were looking for an apartment last summer, with the goal that we would place where we could grow a garden. D.B., who owns our house, said we could convert the whole backyard into a garden if we wanted to. This spring, we eagerly awaited gardening season. Unfortunately we were told it was too early to plant. It was unfortunate because we were ready to get going and we had already bought 3 tomato plants and several herbs. We faced many obstacles to starting out garden. As planting season grew closer, it rained all weekend long a couple weekends in a row. The next obstacle we faced was the feasibility of getting a tiller to our house, since we drive a toy-caresque Honda Fit. Then we had to go on vacation and we were away from home for 2 weekends. When we returned, planting season had come and gone. But we persevered and started with our herb garden. it is in the front of our house in a triangular plot and has chives, two types of lavender, dill, fennel, and catnip. It has worked our well, and we have been harvesting herbs from it. A warning: neighborhood cats have also been enjoying the rewards of our garden. Never plant catnip where cats can get at it. All in all, the herb garden has gone quite well. Here are some pictures.

Lavender

Chives

Dill

Dave's Blood Orange Tree

The vegetable garden has the true saga. It involved back breaking labor which took hours and hours and days and days. First we had to remove the grass, which involved using a pitchfork and shovel digging down several inches. After this we had to till the soil, mixing compost into our rocky sandy dirt. We never did resolve the tiller quandary and decided to till it by hand using the “trench method.” The trench method is digging a 1 foot trench, taking the dirt out and placing it on a tarp, mixing it with compost, and then putting the new mixture back in the trench. It was horrible, don’t ever do it. By the time our garden was ready for plants, it was so late in the season that all we could buy were cucumbers and peppers. We planted them happily along with our tomatoes which had been living in their containers for close to a month. Everything is looking pretty good now, all of the plants have blossoms and keep growing very slowly, they are still pretty small. We do have one small pepper and a couple baby cukes. The soil looks pretty bad on top, with lots of rocks and pebbles. The plants don’t seem to mind too much, though. And, although I might be jinxing us by saying this, I haven’t seen any critters bothering our plants either, which I kind of expected.

The Garden

Pepper Plant

A Pepper!

Cucumber Plant

A Baby Cuke!

Naturally, we can’t harvest anything except for herbs at this point, so we have to travel to farmer’s markets for our produce. Typically, we plan a menu for a couple of weeks of meals and do a big grocery shopping trip. In the summer this is augmented by farmer’s markets. We have gone to the Old Colorado City farmer’s market the past couple weeks. We weren’t sure about this particular market at first, but they have lots of vendors, including a rice seller who gives away bags of rice to people who can’t afford to buy it, like people who have lost their jobs. Quite touching. This week we stocked up on lots of zucchini and summer squash, and corn. We couldn’t resist the delicious Colorado cherries, and we also picked up an eggplant, basil and a cantaloupe. It is good that the zucchinis are plentiful and cheap, because dave can bake with them. We will keep you posted as to our creations with these ingredients but dave is planning to make chocolate zucchini muffins.