Gardening

The garden has been growing like gang busters. We've got strawberries, radishes, spinach and chard all set to harvest. Lily LOVES to go to the garden. She likes to dig in the dirt, point to weeds for me to pull out (she's usually wrong), and just generally run around and get dirty. Oh, and how could I forget watering. I got her a tiny little watering can that she thinks is the greatest thing in the world. 

Here she is clutching the strawberries we picked last week. This week we got twice as many. I'm probably being a little impatient and picking them one day too early, but I'd rather have a slightly less ripe strawberry than a rotten or bug/rat nibbled one. And they taste GOOD. They're small and oddly shaped, but juicy and oh-so-strawberry-tasting. Every one we saw Lily shouted "Ooohhhh!" and then "Mine!". She would have gobbled them all up right there if I had let her.

Radishes are so fun to grow. They grow quick, they're delicious to toss in salads, and they're really fun for little hands to dig out of the ground. We have a million of them, so if anyone wants some I will gladly bring you some. We planted these along with some carrots, and not a single one of the carrots has sprouted. We even did a second planting of carrots. I don't get it, last year the carrots went crazy, this year nothing? We'll keep trying.

I also sort of hap-hazardly planted some spinach and it's coming up pretty well. I harvested some today to put on my sandwich for lunch and throw in with salad for dinner. 

I haven't been doing a good job of going down to the garden to water regularly enough. I've mostly been relying on rainfall, which there hasn't been a whole lot of. I'm going to try to get down there more than once a week to see if that helps the next batch of carrots and maybe some more spinach. I'm really excited to plant some watermelon seeds soon and I can't WAIT to get tomato plants in the ground. 

And I am apparently a terrible house plant gardener. We started some broccoli and pepper plants in peat pots, and they're all dead now. First they grew okay, then they covered themselves in mold, then I forgot to water them for three days in a row. So we might try that again, or not. I'll probably do what I did last year and buy the pepper plants, and plant broccoli seeds in the ground along with one broccoli plant so I know what it's supposed to look like and how it should be growing. As much fun as I have in the garden, I actually know very little about plants and sometimes have a hard time telling which are my plants and which are weeds. 

Hooray for growing things and eating them!