Well, Internet, today I finally put my garden in. Apologies in advance for the weird photos–there was way too much light, and I compensated poorly.
A week or two back, I’d laid the groundwork for the garden, still believing that many, if not most, of my seedlings would be dead by the time that I planted them. (For those of you who haven’t been around for previous gardens, that’s usually how this goes: best of intentions, many things started, most of them either don’t germinate or die before they get planted.) So today I went outside to plant things, and I started in the lovely bed that I’d made, all full of things like compost and peat and dirt that is not made out of clay.
Most of the dirt in my yard seems to be made out of clay, which is reason seventy-six that I’m going to soldier on with my dream of a garden that requires no digging.
After about an hour and a half, I’d reached the point that you see above–the big plants are store-bought tomatoes and bell peppers, the tiny plants are probably tomatoes but might be something else, and then there’s a row of peas and a row of carrots. I’m pretty sure that the tiny plants are tomatoes, but I neglected to label anything when I planted, so that’s an educated guess based on the fact that their leaves resembled the leaves on the purchased, conveniently labeled plants from Home Depot.
The unfortunate part here is that after an hour and a half, I still had a lot of seedlings left. I mean, a lot of seedlings. So I did what anyone would do and figured that I’d go back to the raised-bed plan. I called Maura over from the neighbor’s house and we went off to buy more dirt.
We also bought ice cream. Not really relevant to the story, but damn, it was good ice cream.
After another hour and a half and another 250 pounds of dirt, we had what you see above: the big bed on the ground, plus two wooden frames full of dirt and vegetables.
The frame that you can see in the picture above has watermelon, some sort of hard-skinned squash, oregano, basil, thyme, and rosemary.
The last frame–or, at least, the last one today–has, I think, peppers, cucumbers, swiss chard, and more tomatoes. That’s another guess, as the only ones that I’m sure of are the peppers.
Next to the frame is a box with more seedlings in it. When I started the seeds, I was trying to figure out how to maximize their light exposure, and I thought that I’d try building a tiny, crappy solar oven for them. The cardboard box was cut about double the height of the pots and lined with foil. Shockingly, this had a huge effect on how well the seeds took. I’ll be doing that again next year for all the seeds that I start–the sprouts in the box were consistently bigger and stronger than the seeds that weren’t even in the box, even when they appear to be the same type of plant. I’m quite impressed with my cleverness.
I’m thinking that some evening after work I’ll pull out another frame and try to plant the plants that are left–I think that one more frame and another hundred pounds of dirt would get the rest of the strong seedlings in the ground.
After all of this, I feel like a ridiculously successful gardener. Plus, look what I found when I was putting the tomatoes on:
Baby tomatoes, and flowers promising more to come.