Tales From Our Garden

 Our sunflowers have sprouted......

 ......and we are well on our way to yard of the month fame.  We've been trying to spruce up the front beds with things that will grow quickly, are perennial and also don't require a lot of effort to maintain. Being perma-renters is hard, especially when you're looking at moving every two years or so, but we refuse to live with the shame of ugly flower beds hanging over our heads.  And besides I think there's intrinsic value in gardening and taking something ugly and turning it beautiful.....or in our case semi-beautiful......or maybe just less ugly......well, hopefully the next tenants will enjoy the fruits of our labor anyway.

This plumbago we planted is supposedly invasive.....to which we say, excellent--hopefully it will be as fast growing as all of the doomsayers would have us believe and will quickly fill in the holes left by the half dead azaleas we pulled out.

I totally impulsed on this lavender while we were at the nursery but it's one of my favorite things right now :)

And since we are obviously such expert gardeners we thought to ourselves, "Hey!  Since we are obviously such expert gardeners, why not put in a vegetable garden into one of our existing flower beds as per the rules and regulations from the housing office?"  So we did.

We began by clearing out the overgrown sad flower bed on the sunnier side of the house only to find that it was hiding a deep dark dirty dirty secret......

After a week of chain-sawing, axing and repeated house-shaking mallet hitting* the stump is still there--standing proud and strong albeit a little shorter behind our new vegetable patch.

While Chris was handling the stump situation, I checked out every book I could get on Florida gardening from the library and we decided to go with the square foot gardening approach since we have limited space and they say it is super easy (they being the authors and why would they lie to me?).

Here it is during the putting together phase....if you look closely you can see a lump of a stump behind the left bed and if you are still looking closely you will notice that *shocker* we made our raised beds from our never-ending supply of found wood.

We got a bunch of organic seedlings from a local nursery to start off with (because we aren't completely delusional about our gardening prowess).  The blank squares have squash and jalapeno seeds--well we hope they do--they've already been attacked by some unknown critter so we aren't exactly sure if they are still in there or not......

And here is our finished product.  I'm loving that we haven't actually done any gardening at all but it already looks so green and lovely and productive with all of our cheater plants :)

I made some super fancy plant markers....I know, I know....I should totally open up an Etsy shop to start selling these one of a kind beauties.....

We also rigged up a trellis of sorts for our tomatoes and beans to climb up.  Hopefully it holds--we figure we can always prop it up later if it turns out our tomato plants are just bursting with fruit and the trellis begins to buckle under the weight of all the tomato-y goodness.....which is, probably unlikely.......

The boys were various levels of helpful during this whole process.  David really liked planting the seeds and seedlings with me and both boys liked watering the plants with the tiny bucket I gave them which had the double benefit of keeping them busy running back and forth to fill it up and also not allowing them to flood any poor plants with water from say, the hose.  

Most of their time was spent somewhat less helpfully though, as per usual.

They got the scathingly brilliant idea to drag Chris' car into the street while our attention was otherwise occupied.  They still think they can tow the car away if they just really put their backs into it.  I wasn't about to tell them that they had zero chance of moving daddy's car anywhere with this rope looped round the bumper method--the attempt kept them busy for at least a good half hour......

Will the raccoons and/or armadillo continue to raid the garden?  Will the sunflowers grow into something other than just sprouts?  Will the boys figure out how to put daddy's car in neutral?  Stay tuned to our garden adventure to find out the answers to these and other really really important and interesting questions.

*Chris has requested that I amend this to sledge hammering not mallet hitting--apparently they are not the same thing at all and one is immeasurably less manly than the other.  My apologies :)