The Garden

Lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, carrots, squash, strawberries and pumpkins, oh and sunflowers too! Have you ever grown a sunflower before? It's so easy and rewarding and it really is just a matter of planting a sunflower seed in the ground and watering it. There's something about looking out your living room window and seeing the huge sunflowers growing in the backyard. It makes me feel like I'm on a farm for a few minutes when I see them waving in the breeze. I'm not sure if we'll get sunflowers seeds from the huge flowers but time will tell. I have some big pumpkins growing too and the one that is doing the best was a volunteer plant. I compost my dead plants back into the garden and usually some of the seeds in the compost take root. I get some of my best produce from them because the plant is pretty hardy if it can root and grow without being planted on purpose. It's crazy that a plant that I prepared the dirt for, planted from a seed and watered on a daily basis doesn't grow as much as a random seed in the dirt that just happened to have the right amount of what it needed to grow. Whatever, I'm just happy that my garden grows at all. The square foot garden that we set up is wonderful and I'm so glad we put so much time and energy into it. I love it way more than my regular rectangle garden that I had before. It's much easier to water, weed and harvest this way since there are walkways in between the plants. Also, as soon as the plant is done producing I can pull it up, clean up the soil and plant again without disturbing the other plants. I moved my strawberries into pots and they have done so well. I harvest about a handful a day of fresh strawberries. I wash 'em and pop 'em in my mouth. That way they don't spoil and I get my morning fruit right from the garden. I'm very happy with my garden this year and as always, you get what you put into it.