Garden Growing Pains

Back in May, I had the bright idea of trying to plant a vegetable garden in our back yard. I've wanted to try it for a long time and figured the kids would enjoy it. Unfortunately, I did not seriously take into consideration my brown thumb. So...I've killed several plants in my lifetime and the only reason I have 2 houseplants is because Jim takes care of them - surely that doesn't mean that I can't have a semi-productive vegetable garden. Well, apparently it does. :)

Everything started out well. Our friend Meg came over to help us get started since she knows way more about this stuff than I do. We cleared a bunch of overgrown stuff in our back yard that needed to go and got everything ready to plant some plants. The kids had a lot of fun and really enjoyed getting their hands in the dirt.

All four of the kids helped carry away rocks and weeds to get our garden area ready. One of their favorite things was using the little wheelbarrow and all the fun garden tools. A little hard work sure can be fun!

At this point everything was looking good. We did a good job of preparing the soil, we picked out a nice variety of healthy plants, and got them all planted and well situated. Don't they all look so nice? We even put a ground cloth down to help keep weeds out. I had such high hopes.

This is when it all started to go south. Of course, it doesn't help that the plants we picked will normally fare well in our part of the country. Why does this not help, you ask? Well - this year has been unusually wet. In fact, for the first 6 months of this year we have received almost twice as much rain as normal, most of it coming in the two months since we planted our garden! After several weeks of steady rainfall we had some regular West Texas scorcher days followed by some thunderstorms that brought pea-sized hail - apparently over just our neighborhood. The hail was not large enough or last long enough to do any real damage other than flatten the plants that had survived all the wet weather. After that, we had four little strawberry plants left. We went out to look at them today and guess what! There are actually strawberries out there! They are not real big and there were only three, but it was something! Yay - maybe I don't have a total brown thumb.

Hopefully, we will get a few strawberries out of our four little survivors. If nothing else, the kids have had fun and have learned quite a bit in the process. So has their mommy - primarily that I don't need to go into the gardening business. Oh well - there is always next year!