Sep 4, 2012

Gardening...Its not for everyone

This year Phil and I decided to have a garden (Okay...honestly, PHIL decided we'd have a garden...I just sort of had to go along with it) We bought some seeds, planted them in empty egg cartons filled with compost we went and gathered from the city (helped shovel it and everything!) watered them...and watched them grow.
(Not actually photo of our egg cartons...not sure where those ended up on my computer lol) Despite my begrudging attitude toward the MacDonald garden, I actually started to get really excited when our little plants began to sprout up! Next came time to plant them... Phil gets all the credit for that...he planted everything! Together we kept them watered and weeded and watched them grow and it was all rather exciting for me! My favorite thing to watch was the corn...I LOVE corn on the cob! I was so totally excited about eating my own corn on the cob that we'd grown all ourselves! As the stalks grew from their tiny little seeds I had quite the sense of garden pride. The peas were the first thing to be ready for picking and they were so yummy we were eating them straight out of the pods...but when all was said and done...we only got enough peas for about one meal. That was a bit of a let down, though they were delicious! However both Phil and I began to think our little garden just wasn't big enough to give us the results we hoped for. Still it was a fun to have a little taste of home grown veggies. But that all changed...when the racoon came! Remember those beautiful corn stalks I was so excited about? You should have seen the excitment the day we could see the actual ears of corn finally start growing! I couldn't wait to harvest them...but before we got the chance to, we woke up one morning to find that a racoon had visited our garden and knocked over our stalks of corn and eaten off of our little corn ears! Seriously!?! All that work to feed a RACOON!?!?! Well...that was it for me. Once that dumb racoon ate my corn I lost all interest in the stupid garden. We went on vacation and didn't even bother asking anyone to water it for us. After we came back, Phil went out one day and started to clear out the garden which was overrun with weeds and dead or half eaten veggies. He mananged to salvage a few cucumbers which honestly did pretty well (One is HUGE! I want to make it a giant pickle! hehe) but the funniest part of our garden is the item doing best of all...the tomatoes!
Why is that funny....because we didn't PLANT any tomatoes!!! After we started growing our plants, Phil noticed that some tomoto plants were sprouting up in odd places. Turns out they came from the compost we'd gotten from the city! So he started digging them up and transplanting them into a nice tidy row at the end of our garden. Now, those tomotoes are growing great! Nice and big and delicious! Today we had some of them roasted with olive oil, salt, pepper, and parmesean herb seasoning! DELICIOUS! Gotta say though...its a pretty big slap in the gardeners face when the only plant to do well is the one they didn't plant! Haha Needless to say...we won't be gardening next year...I'll stick to getting my fresh produce from local farm stands. Gardening is NOT for me! :)

1 comment:

Aubrey said...

I am corn. :)

Nothing tastes like fresh produce from your own backyard, but I too have happily settled on my local farmer's market.