Crazy, crazy amounts of marigolds.

I also learned that I should mark the vegetables, because what I thought was parsley turned out to be…

Carrots. Lots of crazy carrots.

And as I always learn, a garden has to be well tended (I had a bit of an excuse this year),

Or it can get really out of control.

My husband helped me out this weekend by digging out all the craziness of the garden, so we could get it back under control. We harvested what was decent, and tossed the rest. Super A had a lot of fun helping out with this.

We have just our banana peppers and poblano peppers left, and I’m hoping I can keep those alive until the end of the season. Next year my plan is to plant less, and water more!

Isn’t this gorgeous?? I am most excited about these.

And our marigolds are blooming like crazy, and so lovely!

Apparently I bought the type of tomatoes that all bloom at once. So in a couple of weeks, I’m going to have a whole bunch of tomatoes.

Another lovely sunflower

In case you are wondering how tall the sunflowers have gotten!

And lastly a quick picture of our abundant parsley.

I mean besides the dead flowers. It looks much better since this picture though.

I thought I bought the dwarf size sunflowers. Not so much.

Our banana peppers are getting flowers! Which means the vegetable is soon to appear.

I have to say the leaf lettuce has by far been the most fruitful. It grows back quickly, and I haven’t had to buy lettuce in weeks.

This year we went with Roma tomatoes. They aren’t supposed to get quite as tall and crazy as the cherry tomatoes. We’ll see.

Pole beans. Not sure how to eat these, but they look fun to grow!

An aesthetic shot of our marigolds.

The Garden.

I am especially excited about…

The Leaf Lettuce.

The Return of the Shamrock.

Our Roma Tomato Plant.

My Sunflowers!

The only plant that was not working well was our potted plant on the patio. It turned out it was a creeping vine and I am not interested in something attaching to my siding. So that had to be re-worked. Super A joyfully helped me re-plant flowers and a strawberry plant in it’s place.

Super A pats each of the plants and asks them how they are doing…he’s such a good gardener!

To reward his kindness towards the plants, I let him pick two more vegetables to add to our garden. He picked:

Squash

Poblano Peppers

Super A called it “birthday earth day”. He is such a big boy now he decided he could carry the soil…

And help fix the pot up…

However we are still working on the term “gently”. To Super A that still means “death grip/with extreme force”.

Here’s our “tree”. I use the word “tree” loosely at this point.

And after some tosses of mulch around the top…

We were all finished. Happy Earth Day!

Don’t know what they are, but they look good! I was planning to label them. I forgot. I digress.

In the plan everything was in straight lines. In real life, a zig-zag pattern.

These are what I’m most excited about. Sunflowers! I don’t think they are supposed to be the 6 foot tall ones, but one can never be sure…

Based on this picture flowers don’t grow in this pot. Maybe they will. I’m still holding out hope.

An Egg container

Seeds

Scissors

Dirt

Miracle Grow

Shovel

Water

Toothpicks

Pen or Marker

What you do…

I picked the styrofoam egg container because I planned on keeping the container inside (if you buy the paper kind there are usually open slots in the lid). Separate the lid from the bottom with scissors. Then poke a bunch of holes in the bottom container (the one with the egg dividers). Then use a shovel to put a little bit of dirt in each egg spot (remove all eggs first, HA!) add a seed and mark on the outside the type of seed. Then use a shovel put a little bit of Miracle Grow dirt on top (remember you don’t want little kids eating this..so if your child is likely to eat dirt…do this part yourself out of their reach). Then place the egg container bottom inside the egg container top (this makes the top act as a water collect0r. Water once a day. Will it work?? Try it and see with me!

Here is where we started…

Check back for updates!

Check out the Better Homes and Garden website for their complete list of the different plants. I really loved that they combined both flowers and vegetables in the garden. We couldn’t access all of the flowers and vegetables they discussed so I compromised on our seed choice.

I also decided to make a comparison project out of it for Super A. We planted some of the seeds in an egg shell container (project description coming soon), then some of the seeds in the garden itself. We are watering them each day (except in the case of rain), and checking to see how they grow in comparison. We bought seeds for carrots, leaf lettuce, green onions, banana peppers, sunflowers, marigolds, roma tomatoes, and radishes. After those start filling in we are going to go back and buy some already sprouted plants to complete the project. I plan to update every few weeks so you can see our results!

No. Maybe next year.

On our huge tomato plant that is growing by leaps and bounds we have a solitary….

tomato

However, we could feed the whole neighborhood with our cherry tomato plant…

I’m still waiting for our pepper plant to actually get more peppers than it came with. The huge amount of rain we got today might help!

Unlike the basil the tomato plants appear to be flourishing in the 100 degree weather..

Although the top of the small tomato plant appears to be getting out of control…kind of like Super A’s hair after he twirls it.

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