Project of the Century

Well lets not go that far, maybe just “Project of the Summer.”  Although taking on a giant vegetable garden may be the project of my century.

My grandma has an amazing flower garden that strangers talk about.  My grandpa can’t NOT grow tomatoes if he tried.  And my parents have been cultivating a magnificent collection of herbs, flowers, and food for the past few years, so I feel like I have genetics on my side.  Not to mention my side kick and resident bug getter, the bf, has gardeners in his past as well, his mom has a lush flower garden and abundance of (living!!) houseplants.  In other words, we can’t go wrong growing a garden of our own…I hope. 

The plan is to include various veggies, a couple herbs, a raspberry bush, lots of mint, and tons of wild flowers.  All of our seeds for the veggies, by the way, came from Cubits because we wanted heirloom organic veggies that we could continually collect seeds from. Definitely check out the etsy store, there is a wonderful variety of fruits, veggies, and herbs.*

The back part of our yard used to be an alleyway and we keep finding weird things in the ground anytime we’ve dug the soil up, so planting straight into the ground isn’t an option.  Not for vegetables anyway. Instead we are considering a raised bed in the back hidden area that gets partial sun (yellow arrow in the picture below) to plant all the leafy greens and partial sun veggies…duh.  Along the fence (not pictured…give me  break) seems to get sun for most of the day, I’ve concluded this because it seems to be where the grass grows like crazy, so we’re thinking a long narrow bed for all the tomatoes, peppers, carrots, sun loving plants..  We’re considering planting into the existing soil, with some compost mixed in, because it was not part of alley…but we are still undecided.   Along the back fence (purple arrows) is where we’ll do a mixture of wild flowers, which hopefully will give some privacy and free blooms for around the house, my flower press, and birthday bouquets.


All that outside stuff doesn’t have to happen for a couple more weeks though, so for now I’ve started the seeds in this little green house that the bf found for me a few months ago.  Only $3.99. We both have an eye for deals!  Last weekend was about 6 weeks away from the last frost date for us, so we planted everything except the squash and carrots which were suggested to start 2-4 weeks before the last frost. 

Here is what it looks like so far:
and after a few days:
Don’t worry, you’ll be joining us for the rest of our summer garden project.  Keep you posted.  Oh and FYI I did not fall off the face of the earth for the last week, I’ve been on weird night shifts and have been zombie like.  I’m sure a half asleep post with incoherent ranting wouldn’t have been very popular, or in discernable English.  Anyway.

Are you starting a garden or some other summertime project?  Do you have any advice for first time, completely naive, very nervous gardeners?  I’ve confused about how to deal with these sprouting seeds, should I wait a while longer before pulling out the weaker plants to let the stronger ones grow? Please help :)

*I was in no way compensated by Cubits, I just heard about their etsy store, they had good prices and lots of variety so I’m giving it a shot!