The Garden of Life

Who's excited for another garden post? Raise your hands! Oooh oooh oooh! Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Hmm...just what I thought. But I've got pictures.

Well, anyway...ah yes...gardening...it's been fun and a learning experience. We have said many times through this new experience "live and learn." Basically, we're learning many things as we go along or The Hard Way. Such is life right?

As you know, this is our first year gardening and whaddya know? we end up having the worst spring season EVER! Not enough sun or heat to get things growing. As a result, our tomato and pepper plants are looking kinda sad these days...wonder if we'll get more than these two tomatoes? Do you see the baby tomato left of the large one? Sniff...

A couple of sad looking plants. Bell pepper on the left and a tomato plant on the right.

Oh and my allergies. Ever present. Yeah, good times.

Deer keep trampling thru our garden, slugs keep slugging and critters have eaten some of our corn before they even had a chance to sprout. I think hubby planted about 10-15 rows of corn and there's maybe five plants here and there that are showing promise. How's that for sad? Half our carrots didn't make it and the watermelon is nowhere in sight. :(

Sometimes it seems we go out to the garden to water the weeds. And I swear just when I've pulled all the weeds they reappear two seconds later. Why is that? But they sure are loving life in our garden. Grr! No matter what the conditions are they'll grow anywhere. And why can't the deer, critters and slugs eat that stuff? The weeds are stealing all the good yum-yums from our plants anyway.

It's frustrating too, to see some of the other nearby gardens with big beautiful tomato plants or corn galore or other wonderful things we seem to be struggling with.

But it's not all bad. In fact, a lot is good. Our romaine and strawberries are abundant! Just need the sun to be steady-eddie for a few days to ripen those berries up. The other half of our carrots are doing their thing (two different varieties so I guess the one batch of seeds was just bad). The onions (red, Walla Walla, and scallions) and garlic are hanging in there - well, the Walla Wallas have been a little slow but I think they'll be okay. We were just about to give up on some cucumbers we're starting from seed when they all of a sudden sprouted. Ooh! This made me so happy to see! The various chard and mustard greens are coming thru finally. And even though we've been struggling with the tomato and pepper plants some of them are still alive (actually, all but one of the pepper plants are growing but they're scrawny) so we're still a wee bit hopeful they'll produce something. Might take a miracle at this point but fingers crossed.

This is the world's smallest ripe strawberry. Those seeds overwhelm the berry!

Here's some merlot lettuce from our neighbor's garden. Another neighbor, Bessie, as hubby refers to her, gave us some merlot lettuce since she doesn't like it so he transplanted those today. We seem to have faired well with lettuce thus far so we're hoping the merlot will do well too. I just love the color.

I've loved being out in the sun (when we've had it), working, witnessing growth and watching all the beautiful life there in the garden. I don't just mean what's been planted but the various birds and bunnies and squirrels and people even. :)

Yellow and Black...Mr. Bumblebee makes an appearance again on some yellow snapdragons (center left).

Some of the entertainment value out in the garden is priceless. One of the funniest things I saw was when I was visiting Bessie in her amazing garden (seriously, it's an oasis almost - she has four plots next to each other and has had them for years so she's worked very hard establishing her garden). This little squirrel, who's obviously not very afraid of humans, comes waltzing into her garden. He actually got quite close to me checking things out. Well, Bessie certainly doesn't want Mr. Squirrel enjoying his stay so she tries to shoo him away. He doesn't know "shoo," his mama apparently didn't teach him that, so she starts chasing him thru her garden and I'm laughing as I watch her run all over the place shooing the squirrel who is running every where but out. It was like I was watching Caddyshack or a Benny Hill-type show. I just needed the funny music to go with it. Okay, maybe it's just me who's entertained or maybe you just had to be there. Trust me, you would've giggled. I apologized to her afterwards for laughing but she laughed too; she wasn't happy about Mr. Squirrel though.

Speaking of entertainment, our community garden is situated in a very large park, so you'll find many things happening here besides the typical picnics and bbqs. There could be Cirque de Soleil going on in one part, dogs running around in another part and a rock concert in another part but this past weekend across from our garden there was fight. Yes, you read right. A fight. But this was no ordinary fight. This one involved grown men. In costumes. And props. I'm talking about a planned fight. I'm talking about NERDS! So consider yourself forewarned: Nerd Alert! Nerd Alert!

Moving on...

Here are some of the birds we see regularly:

I believe the Robin likes to get photographed.

And not sure what kind of bird this is but he makes the strangest, coolest sounds.

CAUTION: Extreme cuteness ahead!

Some bunny in some bunny's yard. ha ha! Lamest joke ever but isn't this the cutest bunny ever?

I can't believe it's officially summer now. Where has the year gone? The garden season is going by so quickly and it makes me a bit nervous. So send us good garden vibes please!! We will need them in hopes of harvesting something.