Our little garden

My mother in law has an amazing garden. I mean, seriously, any space in her yard is prime garden space. Talk about not being wasteful. I can't even imagine how much money she has saved us with her free fruit & veggies (well, free to us, she paid for the seeds and spent a lot of TLC on that food). She is a gardening inspiration. I was so excited to have my own garden once we got the house. I remembered my little radish and carrot garden as a child and saw that I could do it again. So my big push when we first moved in was to clear out space for the garden. I think I was in a bit over my head. My dad was amazing and laid out my garden and cleaned up our fruit trees. The pomegranate and lemon trees were incredibly overgrown! Terry helped me start out some seedlings and I transplanted them when I thought they were ready. But I was a bit overzealous. Some of the seedlings were not big enough to transplant and they died. Others needed more shade than our little garden patch could provide. So we rigged up this tarp thing that shaded the garden. But it was too much shade for other plants. And don't get me started on the weeds! Our neighbor has a palm tree and it drops these little pods which turn into the biggest freaking weeds you've ever seen. And you have to dig them out. Because if you just pull them out then you don't get the root and they keep growing. I spent many hours in that garden cursing Adam for his sin & making the land hard to work. haha

But I did learn a lot. Next year we are going to move the garden to an area with more natural shade & filtered sunlight. We will get the drip system to its maximum potential. (My dad put in a great drip system, but I did not have things planted in the whole garden patch, so it wasn't working correctly for what we needed). This way the garden will get watered and my hubby won't be upset that I spend more time caring for plants than for him (okay, so I talked to the pumpkins a bit, no big deal!). I will choose plants that grow well together and that are good for this area (cactus? haha). I need plant that take good care of themselves, like my fruit trees. And hopefully we won't be doing as much work on the house, this time next year.

In the meantime, enjoy the pictures of some of the good things that happened in our yard!

Check out those sunflowers! (the rest of the dead garden is to the right)

We had so many tomatoes from these plants. Although the ones on the left did not bear much fruit. But I got these 5 plants for free (1 was a gift from the Whites) and took great care of them!

Fruits of my labor: Yummy tomato sauce for pasta!

The insides of my cute little pumpkin

I was very excited that I grew this pumpkin all the way from a seed into a full plant! This was the first thing we picked from our garden