To Garden...?

This is our fifth summer in this house, and we've never had a real garden here even though there's a nice garden plot. Reasons:

2007 - We were trying to get settled in our new house, plus looking forward to our new baby Kasidee.

2008 - We planted tomatoes and carrots and watered them 3 times a DAY (Quentin's idea.) Needless to say, our little plants drowned and nothing survived.

2009 - Trimmed our apple trees right before we left for Disneyland. Trimmings from 10 apple trees can make quite a big pile, and we missed the city pick-up for green waste. So we piled the branches in our garden area, vowing to take them to the dump soon.

2010 - Added our new apple tree trimmings to last year's pile, making a massive pile. I mean, really - the pile was basically as big as our shed.

THIS YEAR - We've decided to take back the yard. Almost 2 months ago Quentin trimmed the apple trees and we began hauling the branches from this year and the last 2 years up to the curb for the city pick-up (Quentin had fun pulling the 5 trailer loads with the 4-wheeler!). Then we spent a couple of hours hand-picking the tiny branches out of the garden, then tilling the garden. And today we finally got to plant our garden!

We have no clue what we're doing, so we'll see what happens. We thought about not announcing our garden plans in case it doesn't work. But now I guess everyone knows, so hopefully it will work out. If not, maybe we'll educate ourselves before trying the garden thing again.

Anyway, we planted cantaloupe,carrots, onions, zucchini, corn, peas, peppers, and 4 kinds of tomato plants - early girl, cherry, grape and yellow pear. And I also have a little herb garden with rosemary, cilantro, basil, chives and parsley (I didn't want the parsley but bought it thinking it was cilantro. Dang.) And in the front, I planted a small pot of geraniums and snapdragons, plus a hosta and cactus my mom gave me. So it's been a planting day! Now we'll sip lemonade the rest of the summer and go out in August to gather our harvest. Wait - what's that? We have to weed and water the garden too? I thought all the hard work was done! : )