Thursday, August 23, 2012

Garden Fail

Oh man...the 2012 garden of mine is a disaster! I really had a romantic ideal in my head that with a new baby, I could just strap her on and spend hours in the garden, taking a few breaks to feed her and then returning to get more dirt under my nails. HA! How naive can I be?
The reality was:
1) By June I was too huge and sore to really get down and dirty in the garden - which was the beginning of the end
2) A newborn and a 4 year old and hosting to all the family that came to see our beautiful girl left little time for gardening
3) With the baby-free time that I did have, I had to choose between sleeping, eating, showering, spending time with family or gardening and sleeping usually won.

On the plus side, my husband built me four new garden boxes that we used this year. I had four, 4'x4' raised garden boxes that I separated again into the 1' sections like last year. I say 'raised' but when I went out to check on Eric who was setting them up, he had dug down into the earth so that they were kind of half above the ground and half in the ground...and he had put them in a different spot than I had wanted, but really, I was super pregnant and I couldn't help so I shouldn't complain, right? (but on a side note...my plan had been explained to him several times and he still did it wrong. It was a little frustrating). Oh, and I should mention that all the dirt/sod that he dug up to make room for the boxes was thrown to the side and is still sitting next to the garden beds, with a forest of weeds on top.
Anyway....
What I planted this year:
Green bush beans
Scarlet red bush beans
Red onions
Lettuce mix (I don't think I'll do a mix next year, just individual heads of lettuce)
Tomatoes - cherry, plum and your typical round tomato
Snap peas
Carrots
Green Peppers
Watermelon - which gave me tons of flowers but only one fruit which only showed up about a week ago so I highly doubt that I will get a ripe watermelon this season, plus, this little watermelon decided to fruit on the one flower that made if through out fence into our neighbours yard and is now too big to pull if back through. That must be karma's way of telling me not to be upset about the garden boxes being in the wrong spot.
Beets - which did a whole lot of nothing
Turnips - which I harvested too late and were rotten when I pulled them from the ground
Radishes - they were yummy.

I got a great amount of cherry tomatoes, which I roasted and froze to add to sauces later in the year and the green beans are so delicious that I can't completely write off this garden just yet. But it definitely wasn't the garden that I had fantasized about.

Next year will be better.