Gardening 2009: The Planting

I’ve spent all week doing really extensive work on our little garden. Last year, we grew about 9 quarts of strawberries and more tomatoes than we knew what to do with. (Who am I kidding? I ate ’em with a little salt and made tons of fresh pasta sauce.) We kind of let the garden go towards the end of the summer with Shauna’s pregnancy and it needed some serious taming. The grass was up to my thigh in most places, half of the strawberry plants had crept out of the planter, there are stumps we’ve been meaning to remove for so long that the hubby already bought the best electric chainsaw he could find, and forgot about it in the garage, and the entire area was snail central. I’ve been tired, dirty, and sweaty just about every evening, but the end result speaks for itself.

All of the strawberries have been relocated into the planter, most of the grass has been torn up, and new tomatoes are in the ground. That’s not all of it, though we also added a bird house and we have been telling everyone this spring add a bird house to your backyard from your wild bird supplies store. While Shauna went out to pick up some new tomato plants, a few other things caught her eye. Like zucchini and cucumbers. We are playing with the thought of installing a few very small outdoor fountains that are modern. We both think that we will enjoy them and the worst case is that we don’t and we give them to someone we know that will.

She also brought home a few cilantro plants.

You can’t see them in these pictures (mainly because there’s so tiny), but a member of our ward donated some extra basil seedlings to drop into the garden. It took an entire week to get together, but we’ll be eating good this summer. Any volunteers to pick the produce when we go to Sacramento in July?