Innocent enough, part 2

I recently wrote about a wooden frame we inherited from our neighbor. To recap, she didn't want it anymore and we thought we could use it to make a new vegetable garden. The new vegetable garden needed dirt, so we ordered the minimum amount from the dirt company. Of course, it was way more than we needed. So now what do we do with all that extra dirt?

As soon as Nathan suggested a new flower garden for the backyard, I jumped on the idea. "Oooh, pretty pretty flowers!" I dreamed with little thought to the extra work it implied. We outlined the new flowerbed to wrap around our master bedroom and began hauling dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. Here is the result of a lot of shoveling, hoeing, and sweating: That evening, like the engineering nerd I am, I drew up a scale drawing of the new flower bed so we could plan out what flowers to buy and were to place them. Maybe all those design shows have finally gone to my head. I would draw up something, show it to Nathan, and he would reply "do you think we can fit all that in there?". I would then draw up something new, with a few less plants, and show it to him again. After a few iterations, I finally got it down to a reasonable number of plants. I guess I was a little over excited --- I think my first drawing had well over 25 plants in it!

The next morning, Nathan took me around to a few nurseries to buy plants. We got a lot of good ideas talking to people there. In fact, I don't think we bought a single plant we originally had on the plans. They were all completely different, and some of them we had never seen before! Here is what we planted:

Cigar Plant: the small orange flowers attract hummingbirds and butterflies, Nathan's favorite	Purple Salvia: picked because the purple looked nice with the orange of the cigar plant
Ice Plant: not sure why it is named that, my favorite because of the small red flowers and thick succulent-like leaves	Rose Bush: the nursery promised us it is hardy, our first rose bush ever
Vinca: white with red centers to coordinate with the other flowers, plus we know we won't kill it!

And now for the final product (drum roll please...): The plants have already started to fill in nicely.

Veggies are coming

Our new vegetable garden is now planted. It was pretty easy and actually didn't take very long. Now for the hard part --- waiting for all the yummy veggies to come!

This year we planted all kinds of things. Some came from seed, some from the nursery, and surprisingly enough some from the compost pile! We are (attempting to) grow:

• tomatoes (yellow pear, red cherry, and a mystery type that sprouted from the compost heap),
• bell peppers (yellow, red, and green),
• hot peppers (jalapeno, serrano, habanero, and kung pao --- we like it hot and spicy!),
• cucumbers,
• mystery melon (again from the compost pile, we think it is cantaloupe),
• eggplant,
• squashes (yellow crookneck, green zucchini, and gray zucchini), and
• various types of greens.

I wonder if that's enough... Ha! Here are some prize specimens:

Newly sprouted zucchini seedlings all straight in a row.	Our very first bell pepper, still a bit on the small side.

Now if we can just keep from killing them...