How Does Your Garden Grow?

I will be the first to admit that I do not have a green thumb. I tend to kill any plant that crosses my path. Thankfully, I married someone who is VERY handy in many aspects of life, but especially in cultivating a garden. We planted super late last year, so our garden wasn't spectacular, although we did get quite the bumper crop of zucchini, which resulted in many, many loaves of zucchini bread, which we are still enjoying today. This year, we planned ahead and planted much earlier in the season, and AJ did a lot of research on soils and the right mixture to have, etc. and he worked really hard to get everything just right, and it has totally paid off.

We currently have 3 planter boxes full of growing things (AJ made 2 of the planter boxes a couple of years ago out of the railroad ties we already had in the yard and some bricks. See, I told you he was handy to have around!). Our pumpkin has almost completely taken over the garden box it was planted in, but we are super excited, because these are supposed to be the really big pumpkins! We're hoping to have a whole family of jack-o-lanterns come October. There's also asparagus and banana peppers planted in the same box, but the pumpkin is kind of taking over, as you can see.

The next box has our corn, carrots, radishes and something else that I'm forgetting (squash or zucchini, I believe). Our corn is pretty small this year, and we really don't know if we'll get anything but it's fun to watch it grow.

And then there is our last planter box...this was our original garden, and as you can see we have expanded it somewhat, but the plants are all growing magnificently. We have three kinds of tomatoes: roma, beef and cherry (which is pretty funny seeing as how AJ and I can't stand tomatoes for the most part). Then we have sugar peas and snap peas, green, yellow, red and orange bell peppers, more banana peppers and squash and strawberries. Sp far the only ones enjoying our strawberries are the slugs that get to them before we can pick them, but we are hoping to prevent that from happening in the near future.

We didn't get it planted this year, but our 4th planter box will hopefully be an herb garden next year full of mint, basil, oregano, cilantro, chives and who knows what else. I'm really excited to see if I can actually keep things alive and thriving enough to have my own herbs to use.

Our garden has also been an all-you-can-eat diner for the local skunks (thanks to the plentiful grubs found in the soil), and they were digging up the soil and displacing all of our seeds (we had some cantaloupe planted and more squash that ended up not making it thanks to the little stinkers) so AJ managed to fabricate an electric fence that we turned on at night to keep them from getting into the two main planter boxes and it has worked FANTASTICALLY!! Granted, I haven't liked the skunk smell that gets left behind when they get a "little" electric zap, but after three or four times, they haven't returned, and our garden is thriving!!

Now we just have to take care of those slugs...:)