Oh How Does Your Garden Grow?

So being the pseudo-hippie that I am (well, I'm more of a faux hippie because I shower and shave my arm pits) I got the idea that it would be fun to plant a garden. Just a small, simple introduction to the world of horticulture (not counting the one online horticulture class that my roommate Crystal and I took in college ... I mean, really, who takes a horticulture class online?? Yep, my plants died.) 

So I approached my husband about the idea and he was totally game. So we set out to plan our little garden experiment. Well, somehow our small garden idea went from a plot in the backyard to a greenhouse. What the heck? I've never planted a plant in my life and we're planning a year round greenhouse? Well, we finally scaled our plans down from the greenhouse to a small pasture of a garden. Thankfully Kirk's family already had a 50 X 50 foot fenced in plot that they had used for a garden about 5 years ago. So we set about cleaning it up and getting it ready. Now picture it ... all ready for planting. From here we made a few mistakes:

1) Do we practice  a bit of self-control and only buy enough plants to feed our family?  Nope, we decide to fill the garden. We bought over a 130 plants. Squash, cucumbers, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers ... you name it ... we got it. When we were leaving the nursery the woman who had been helping us said, with a slightly sarcastic tone, "have fun with all that!" Thanks, lady. 

2) We plant the garden at Kirk's parents 2nd house that is 45 minutes away from where we live. So we make it up once a week to care for the garden. 

3) We decide that for the first month we don't really need to weed? Why? Almost every weekend it was raining. Now, don't get me wrong, the rain is good and much needed (makes our job easier). However, raining combined with no weeding for a month means problems. Even I, the inexperienced gardener than I am, know that.

So we get up to the house this past weekend and pull up to the garden fulling expecting all of the plants to be dead. We pulled up and there was GREEN everywhere! I was so thrilled! We hadn't killed the plants!! However, upon closer inspection, I suddenly came to the stark realization that over half of the plants that were growing there were not planted by us and did NOT belong there. Whoops.

So we spent over 10 hours this weekend getting our hoe on (not getting on our ho ... you dirty minds), watering, fertilizing, and raking. I was working as hard as my 8 month pregnant body would let me ... riding the 4-wheeler while carrying buckets of fertilizer, shoveling and basically dominating the mega weeds that had taken over the garden that were trying to choke our plants. When it was all said and done, we have a VERY respectable garden. We even have a few squash that are already coming in! Now if we can only figure out what we're going to do with all these vegetables ......