Garden update

James and I have been driving up to the garden every week for the past two months. It has been quite therapeutic and relaxing, and we find ourselves looking forward to it more and more. It's been wonderful to spend time with each other as we drive out there wondering and dreaming about what our garden looks like, and then being so surprised at how big and beautiful it looks when we actually get there. The drive is nice; long stretches of roads with newly growing farmland on both sides mixed in with small towns that force you to slow down. It's nice. Here's the latest picture of our garden from Saturday. For comparison I've included a picture from the garden from the beginning of June. Isn't is awesome?!

Our garden on June 4th. Ours are the three rows in the middle of the picture by the sign.

Our garden on July 2nd. Look how much our garden has grown (and the weeds from the neighbors!)

The sunflowers are almost up to my waist now, and one of them has a flower forming. They are Mammoth Gray Stripe Sunflowers and we hope to get a bunch of sunflower seeds from them. If not, well at least they'll keep the birds and insects from bothering our other plants. We also have zucchini growing. There were at least seven flowers and some actual plants, but whether or not they form into zucchini is yet to be seen. We'll know better next week. Our potato plants are doing awesome, so are our carrots and onions. And we were so excited to see that one of James' pumpkin plants had survived whatever was trying to eat it in the first place! Woo-hoo! We got a couple of transplants last week, and we planted them out next to the other pumpkin plant to keep him company. The pole beans and Sweet Crimson watermelon is showing, too, and I really hope they take off because I want to taste some homegrown watermelon. :)

For some reason, the first ten feet of our garden does not like to grow anything. First we planted strawberries and they didn't grow, so we pulled them after a while. Then we planted cauliflower, but we may have been too late for those to take off. After a while we dug up the ground and put marigolds on the first and third rows and planted pepper seeds in the middle. The peppers are supposed to take between 10 and 20 days to emerge, but so far there has been nothing and it's been over 35 days and nothing has come up. I don't think they are going to grow either. So next week we plan on digging up the middle row and planting a different kind of watermelon. We are only going to plant two seeds together and then thin it down to one plant after the seedlings pop up. There just isn't enough room otherwise. Hopefully that will grow there. It could be that there's too much water in that area and nothing is growing, so I think the watermelon plant would do just fine there. However, I'm not sure that's what it is since the marigolds are doing really well. At first we thought they weren't going to survive, but they have come back really strong. I'm not sure why nothing is growing in the first ten feet, but I'm glad everything else is doing well.

I hope hearing about our garden isn't boring you all. We are just so excited about it. We are first time gardeners, so those of you who have planted gardens before might understand our excitement at our first real gardening experience. I'm not sure if the novelty will wear off after a few years or not. I kind of hope it doesn't because there's just something very cool to me about throwing a tiny seed into a bare patch of dirt and watching it grow into some of the most beautiful plants and tasty vegetables (and fruit) I have ever seen or tasted.