Just call me Mary

As in "...quite contrary. How does your garden grow?"

A little over a month ago, a good friend of mine from high school came to visit and help me plant my first garden. Even she, who has gardened oft times before, was not prepared for my big dreams of vegetable delight. Yes, as I told a new blogging buddy, I've been stifling this post of my journey toward becoming a novice gardener for a while now, but at the bottom of this LONG (sorry) post, you'll see why I decided to blog about it now. So let me tell you about the pictures in the collage above (right click and "open in a new tab" to view it larger and reference back and forth). Starting in the upper left corner and working clockwise: 1) Before we started the garden, we created a compost heap. When my friend visited a year & a half ago we dug a few holes for compost, but when they got filled up, Michael and I just started tossing our compost material into the woods, so now we again have a place where it belongs. 2) Me digging up the front border of the garden. 3) Here are the seedlings we purchased—2 banana pepper plants, 9 bell pepper plants, 8 cucumber plants, 9 tomato plants (5 different varieties), 6 summer squash plants, a bunch of onions. And that doesn’t include the seeds that I planted, so you can why my friend was a bit overwhelmed by my lofty goals. 4) Me planting. {Do you see the THICK mud caked on my work gloves and up the side of my shoe?} 5) A cucumber plant. 6) Michael tilling. 7) Our mulch—my friend suggested spreading news paper between the rows and around the base of the individual plants for the purposes of mulch {to keep weeds from growing, help the plant retain moisture, and prevent the soil from washing away…just in case you are not keen to the purposes of mulch, which I wasn’t}; however, we don’t subscribe to the paper, but I DO have quite a bit of packing paper from all my Stampin’ Up! orders!!! This paper is similar to the material of paper bags, so we decided it was totally usable. 8) The plot, after the first tilling and raking, with a cow in the background.

Now here's the garden at 1 week, and a Roma tomato plant at the end of the tomato row.

Here's week 2. I went back and forth between taking pictures on Monday or Thursday, because Monday is the day when we had finished planting all the seedlings and the back row of seeds (butternut squash, pumpkins, and sunflowers), but Thursday was the day I planted the last of the seeds. So the week 1 pics were taken on Monday, April 27, and the week 2 pics were taken on Thursday, May 7. The same Roma plant and my first sprouts-cantalope!

I seem to have missed Monday & Thursday of week 3, so here are pics from Monday, May 18~week 4. Same Roma plant, and this time some zucchini sprouts!

And today we went out to tackle the weeds that are attempting to take over the garden (I've been bad about weeding) and found these on that now famous Roma plant.OUR FIRST TOMATOES!!!!! (See those green balls in the middle of all those leaves? There are 5 little tomatoes on this plant!)

Sweet wishes!
ps. Yes, that wheel barrow sat in the corner of the plot for 4 weeks. It's gone now, though.