Our Life Together

The Edibles.

One of the easiest ways to start growing edibles is container gardening with herbs.  I’ve done container herb gardens for the past two years.  This year, we grew mint, basil, oregano, and cilantro.

(Speaking of mint, it is a great addition to iced tea and salads! Just last night, I plucked a decent amount of leaves to wash, chop, and incorporate into a summer chicken-zucchini-spinach-pecan-parmesan salad! Yum! If you grow it yourself, I’d recommend relegating it to a separate pot. Mint has a tendency to take over and kill the other herbs!)

When our cilantro went to seed and died, we saved the seeds and tried to start new cilantro plants.  They’ve made an appearance, but don’t seem to be getting any bigger.

Our first summer in a house with a yard has also lead to new adventures in gardening veggies.  It sort of happened by accident.  One day we were working in the yard and decided to clear a bed for a future vegetable garden.

Meanwhile, our next door neighbor came out on his deck to chat. Upon hearing we were interested in doing a vegetable garden, he offered to give us plants from his yard as he was soon moving out. We ended up with 5 tomato plants and a cucumber plant.  Three of the tomato plants survived, but only two actually grew.  The cucumber has yet to produce anything and we’re starting to wonder if it even is a cucumber plant.  We even provided a lattice plank for it to crawl on, but nothing, nada, nichevo. Here was our garden then, on it’s first day of plantings:

Later, Trevor and I added to our burgeoning collection of vegetables by purchasing zucchini and red bell pepper plants.  Since this was our first foray into vegetables, we had no conception as to how big our plants would get.  After a hard rainfall, the zucchini seemed to take off. Here is the second photo of the growing plants:

The zucchini leaves now block sunlight from our cucumber mystery plant and the pepper plant!  It’s producing lots of flowers and we’ve spied at least one zucchini on it. It would seem that the garden took to heart our encouragement by way of the “grow” sign we hung over their space.

I’m not too confident that we’ll be eating from our garden much this year, as I know at least for some of the vegetables, it is already past their prime for production. But this first experiment has certainly proven fruitful enough in other ways to give us the itch to grow more.  Our tomato plants at least look very promising and we hope to get a decent crop from them in the coming weeks.

So needless to say, I think we’ll be expanding it next year.  We’re hoping to triple the depth and create a tiered system for planting in raised beds, which will hopefully help us grow more.