The Garden

When we first moved into this house, I commented to Gurmeet about how nice the grounds were already. That maybe I wouldn't "need" to have a garden. With our lovely yard and a new membership to Draper Farm's CSA, I would have no need to plant anything. Well, I was wrong. If I'm not growing something, it just feels, well, wrong.

In late February or early March I bought our first tomato plant, a sungold cherry. The fruit is orange and as sweet as berries - perfect for the kids, maybe even my picky one.

In April, we picked the sunniest spot for a small vegetable garden. Gurmeet dug up the grass (what a guy!) and I layed out the old raised bed garden, reconfigured from last year. We covered the bottom with gopher protection and filled it with compost, chicken manure and earthworm castings. Then we purchased a few starts: a few tomatoes, a couple of peppers, a cucumber, a baby watermelon, (Arjun's pick), a zucchini and some flowers. We also planted some seeds: Swiss chard, beets and carrots. Then I installed a drip-irrigation system (something I now know I should have done before planting). I fed them with fish emulsion and sea kelp. All the plants seemed very happy. We had about 65 square feet of garden!

But on Mother's Day, I got the crazy idea to take the remainder of the raised bed pieces and added another 35 square feet of garden space, for a total of around 100 square feet. When Gurmeet was travelling to Japan and Australia, my mom came for a visit and we added the soil and the plants and built a teepee for the beans she brought and a squash trellis, inspired by one I saw on www.digginfood.com . We also planted some zinnias and celery and made space for a later planting of beets, lettuce and carrots, which was later ruined by an animal walking through it.

Gardening is like a big experiment and nothing is guaranteed. You can do everything right and then leaf miners can come and destroy all your Swiss card. Or you can grow a sunflower 6 feet tall and then a deer can nibble the head off from the other side of the fence. Or a bird can mistake a sprouting bean plant for a grub and yank it out and leave it to die on the ground (that one I managed to save!). All in all, though, I've had pretty good luck. This is my biggest garden yet, and it's about all I can manage right now, so it's really perfect. I like to go there to retreat. I like to see how many fruit have set on my tomatoes. I like to hand-pollinate my zucchini.

Here are some photos of the progression of our garden:

Mid April:


May 10:


May 25:


June 18:


Delicata Squash:


First Zucchini:



June 22:



Sun Gold Cherry Tomato:


Baby Watermelon:


Zucchini we used for lasagna and muffins:


June 30, Our salad, harvested entirely from our garden!


It's hard to believe that the garden will get any fuller, but it will. Still to come are all the larger tomatoes: Japanese Black Trifele, Pineapple, Green Zebra (almost there!), Delicious and Cherokee Purple. We're also going to be getting quite a few cucumbers, red, jalepeno and ancho peppers, those watermelons, two kinds of winter squash, cantaloupe, beets, more carrots, and four kinds of beans! I'll take more pictures as things change. That's one of my favorite things about growing anything: watching the transformation.