I want to take a bit of time to talk about my garden. Those who know me well, will know I love to grow stuff. I am not particularly green fingered, so I don't tend to grow things to look pretty. I grow vegetables, fruits and the occasional flower.
Back in the UK, I would grow tomatoes, peppers, chilies and strawberries. One year I grew enough tomatoes to make sauce for chili, spaghetti Bolognese, lasagne etc. It lasted for 3 months. I have also been known to grow mangoes and avocado from stones in fruit I have bought in the supermarket. These went quite well, and I had to give them to family and friends when I left. I would love to know how they are getting on. I never had an area laid out for a veggie patch, I just used the flower beds.
When we moved here, I loved the fact the house has a vegetable patch. The owners had some success growing things, but the previous tenants did not. As we moved in in October, I have had plenty of time to plan what I wanted to do. Pinterest has been very helpful in this. I got inspiration and tips here, here, here and here. If you want to check out my gardening board on Pinterest it can be found here.
So I started in february. Isaac and I took a trip to Big Lots, just to be nosy, and see what they had. We came away with strawberry seeds, chili pepper greenhouse, and some bulbs or flowers. As time went on I purchased cucumber, mint, lavender, cat nip, rosemary, thyme, basil and sunflower seeds. I also collected seeds from the copious amount of peppers we get through a week. I planted the chili peppers, strawberry, tomato, cucumber and pepper seeds in containers inside at the end of february, in the hope of getting them outside at the end of April.
About a month later, I planted the rest of the seeds. By now, my cucumbers had come up, and died. Tomatoes did well, as did the chili. The peppers seemed to be fairing well too. I planted more cucumbers, some of these came up.
I started putting things into the garden around March. Most of the things I put in the veggie patch had some broken egg shells go in the holes before the plants did, in the hope it would help nourish them in the clay soil we have
And the results.......
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| My veggie patch |
About 3 of my cucumber plants survived the move to the garden, though none have done well enough to give any fruit. I purchased some cucumber plants from Isaacs school. These are doing well. One has a couple of fruit on in.
The other two appear to be ball cucumbers
This is the only mint that grew from the many seeds I planted. I did invest in a bigger plant from a local garden centre. I need mint for the jugs of mojito's I make
This is my herb pot, it has basil, rosemary and thyme. The seeds I planted did nothing, so I invested in these from the same garden centre. Perfect herbs for cooking.
My chili plants have done very well. I have 5 plants in the ground, 3 in a pot, and have given one away. They are not quite ripe yet, but there are plenty of them. I am looking forward to using these in cooking
My tomato plants have about 10 fruit on them. Because of all the rain we have had, they have got very large. We just need some sun now.....
Our grass is looked after by Trugreen. There was a lot of weeds in there, so much so that the housing association sent our land lord a snotty letter basically saying we had to get the front sorted. Funnily enough, he got the letter about 2 days after we employed Trugreen to take care of our lawn.
When Paul cut the back garden on Friday, he cut a race track into it. The track also has a NASCAR circuit contained inside it.
Our boys love racing cars.
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