Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Gardening: Fourth time's a charm

Last summer we had a little garden planted in our back yard.  It did ok pretty bad.  We really didn't get much food from it.  In fact, our squash and zucchini were taken over almost immediately by evil squash bugs.  Nothing we did seemed to help.  Evil, I tell you! But we chalked up most of our failures to the fact that we had planted late (not to the fact that we had no idea what we were doing.)

This year we started our seeds indoors in these cute little plastic planters, like the ones that your get your small plants in from Wal-Mart.  They looked slighly pathetic, but hey, they were sprouting!  Since we both have (over) educated backgrounds we thought we could increase the size of the garden by 12x4 feet or so and have all these amazing vegetables.   Naturally, we would do organic to be environmentally friendly, blah, blah, blah.  It sounds good, until you realize the work involved.  More on that later.

One sunny April day I went out and planted all our little seedlings.  I watered them, some. But, uh, they didn't make it.  I tried again with seeds directly in the ground. Nothing for a week or so.  I got ancy and tried again.  ~Look, it's obvious I'm not great at this.  My biology background is in molecular work, not horticulture.~  In other words, no those seedlings didn't pop up either.  But if you want me to extract DNA and sequence it, I'm there.

However, after reading some literature on how to plant certain plants together to assist in pest control, I tried one last time.  It worked!  (I think God took pity on my persistance.)  The amusing part?  Some of the plants that I'd planted before popped up too.  So I have a few rogue tomato plants, broccoli in my cucumber patch, and some diverged carrots and lettuces.  But hey, they're there!




The important thing is, I can grow things! And so can you. (Probably much better than myself.)

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