My pathetic garden

For those of you who don't know, I grew up on a farm in N.W. Oklahoma. Every summer we had a massive garden with every veggie you can imagine. We ate fresh vegetable everyday. My favorites being fried okra, fried squash, fresh tomatoes ( preferably with cottage cheese), sweet corn, and new potatoes and peas ( fresh peas alone are pretty fantastic as well).

I realize now how much I took these delicious vegetables for granted. Now that I live away from home I rarely get to enjoy these favorite foods. I try to recreate them on occasion but I have yet to be able to make any of them taste as good as when Mom cooked them. However, every summer since I have been married I have tried to grow some sort of vegetable. At our last apartment I grew tomatoes in our three foot by two foot little plot of dirt and they did pretty well. I tried to grow squash and peppers in a pot, but both of them died before we got any produce.

When we bought our house I was super excited about having a backyard where I could grow veggies in the summer. So when spring came around we bought two kits to build miniature raised beds so we could have a real garden. The kits, dirt, plants ect. were not cheap, but I was excited about my gardening adventure. When Mom came to visit in April we planted garlic, onions, beats, carrots and lettuce in one bed and later Zach and I planted tomatoes, peppers, and squash in the other bed. I had very high hopes for everything.

Turns out I'm not that great of a gardener. Part of my problem could have been that right around the time things should have started to produce something I was had a baby and all the drama that followed. But to date we have had 3 tomatoes, one squash ( both squash plants have since died), 10 beats ( the largest being maybe an inch long, all eaten this evening), lettuce for one salad and a couple sandwiches ( Peter Rabbit got the best of this ),and Abbey claims to have used some of our carrots and onions in her cooking last week. The pepper plants look great but have produced zero peppers. The garlic made maybe one clove per plant, hardly worth digging around to try to find them.

We did plant herbs around the edge of an existing flower bed and those little plants have done well. We have used them a lot and it is super fun to go cut fresh herbs while cooking. But other than that I feel that I am a pretty miserable gardener. I am currently debating if I should try again next year or just save my money and go to the farmers market.