Life of a gardener

Slowly, very slowly I am learning about being a gardener.  Not a good one, of course, but little by little I am getting somewhere, hopefully.  You have to know, I have the brownest thumb in the world and no plants survive inside our house.  I kill them all, except this one orchid I got from Ehren because it just needs 3 ice cubes once a week and I can handle that.  So to go from that to trying to do something outside our house is pretty brave of me.  It was great when my mom was here because she absolutely loves everything about gardening and she would be out in the dirt all day every day if she could. So it was great for her to have the initiative to start up our place.  I like working along side someone like that because I don't need to know much, I just watch and do what I'm told.  But this year I am taking it in my hands and it is a new experience for me.  Of course, Ehren has quite a big input in what we do and we have a few "discussions" about what should go where but in the end it is up to me what will be planted.

Since I know that I really dislike gardening and working with plants, bugs crawling over me and the mosquitoes biting while I'm doing it I do everything on a pretty small scale.  My mom started a small vegetable garden in the tires last year and we had such great crops from that that I am doing that again.  We added 3 more tires and a small area where I planted tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, radish and lettuce.  I feel like it is better for me to go small and being able to handle it and mostly get ok results as trying to do a huge garden and get hardly anything because it is overwhelming and I wouldn't have time for it anyway.

So today was our gardening day and I can't believe how much work we got done in just one day.  We fixed up the corner in front of our house with some edging material, rearranged some of the plants in there and weeded the whole area.  Now we just need to put down the wood chips on top and for this year we're done with the corner.  I know it could look prettier with more variety of plants but it is fine for now.  We still have to do the whole right side in front of the house the same way, with a couple bushes or something to make it look nicer.  A sidewalk would be very nice too but we might wait for a good deal on some stepping stones or something.  Besides that corner I managed to plant almost all my vegetables.  I was really happy about all that being done and I so should have known something was going to happen.  A very quick and big storm was coming through just after we got done with everything and put stuff away in the garage.  Here is me thinking inside, this will be great for all my plants, some nice rain is just what they need.  That is until the rain came.  It started pouring and pouring harder and pretty soon it wasn't just pouring out but pea-size hail was falling everywhere.  On my plants!  I was just watching out the kitchen window in disbelief, watching the ground getting whiter and whiter.  Finally the storm passed and I rushed out the door to check on my poor plants.  I am thinking at this point, maybe I am getting to be a bit of a gardener, thinking of my plants as my kids or something. :)  The tomato, pepper and cucumber plants look ok but the tiny lettuce is all gone.  We have to wait and see how they do and I am just hoping I don't have to replace too many of them.  But I guess that is the life of a gardener or a farmer.  You never know what the weather will bring and you just have to embrace it for what it is and start over.  Yes, start over.

To be honest though, I sure am thankful that our family doesn't depend on the food from our crops.  This way if "stuff" happens we move on.  It doesn't affect us much, other than our mood I think or I should say my mood.  "All that work, time put in it and money to buy everything and it is all for nothing" is something I would be thinking and just getting mad at the situation.  But really, there is so much more to it than the end result of the vegetable or fruit garden.  There is the family time spent taking care of it, teaching children about how the plants grow and how we take care of them, just being outside together and taking care of what God gave us.  So I will try to be thankful for this day despite the hail ending of it and know that tomorrow is a whole new day and a new day to be able to garden or do whatever.  "This is the day that the God has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it" came to mind for some reason. :)

Hope you've had a blessed day wherever you are.

there are my tires

digging in the dirt and loving my new gardening gloves

the corner I wrote about, it still needs to be covered with the wood shavings

lettuce, peas, cucumber and carrots in the little dirt spot

I like it that I can weed while the kids are playing on the swing set

tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers

only the red flowers survived the hail.  Will have to expand this corner a bit

we are very excited to see the green grass after having dirt lawn for so long.
It will need a lot of weeding but  it's coming in nicely.

and the wood chips are done too.
Now the next job is doing this on the right side of the front door.