Gardening is such a lovely Minnesota ritual, and I am so incompetant at it. I like thinking about gardening, I love looking through seed catalogs, I can have a lot of fun planning the garden, and I usually enjoy the springtime stuff: turning over the soil, raking it out, planting stuff. After that, I lose interest. Weeds and zucchini battle it out for world supremacy, or else everything dies because I forgot to water it. It doesn't help that for years, our garden was in our back yard, which is very shady, so even when I watered religiously and the weather was perfect, we'd get a half-dozen tomatoes (off of seventeen tomato plants -- yes, really) and no zucchini at all (just lots of pretty yellow flowers).
Last year, I moved my garden into the front yard and made a bit more of an effort to at least vaguely keep it up. I've accepted the fact that I am a very bad gardener and no longer try to plant anything terribly exotic. It's worth making an effort for tomatoes, because homegrown tomatoes are so much better than anything you can buy in a store; it's less worth it (to me) to make an effort for homegrown cucumbers, since I find grocery store cucumbers to be perfectly acceptable (ditto grocery store carrots, melons, pumpkins, etc.) We plant basil to go with the tomatoes. Frustratingly, we STILL didn't get enough tomatoes. But, we really like tomatoes. A lot. I'm not quite sure how many would be "enough."
I finally got the tomato plants in yesterday -- a four-pack of Early Girl and a couple different interesting looking heirloom varieties. I had intended to plant some spring vegetables (sugar snap peas) and even bought the seeds, but never got them into the ground -- funny how hard it is to get motivated to garden when it's cold and dreary for most of May. Since the weekend was supposed to be nice, I ran out on Friday just before the garden store closed and bought the basics: tomato plants, basil seeds, marigolds (to repel pests) and morning glory seeds (for the trellises; this is a FRONT yard garden, so I have to have SOMETHING decorative). Oh, plus a few more herbs -- they had thyme, rosemary, and lemon grass in pots. (Now, lemon grass would be worth growing for ourselves! We cook a lot of Thai food, and those herbs-in-plastic-boxes at the grocery store are expensive.) I got it all planted in a few hours on Saturday. Now I have to get motivated to go back out for petunias sometime this week (to fill in the blank spots) and put them in the ground, and then I'll be done except for the hard part -- watering and weeding. (And the fun part -- picking and eating stuff, like tomatoes.)
My mother's garden, meanwhile, looks like something out of Midwest Home & Garden, that "look how the other half lives" publication you get bundled with Minnesota Monthly when you give money to public radio. Sigh.
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Last year, I moved my garden into the front yard and made a bit more of an effort to at least vaguely keep it up. I've accepted the fact that I am a very bad gardener and no longer try to plant anything terribly exotic. It's worth making an effort for tomatoes, because homegrown tomatoes are so much better than anything you can buy in a store; it's less worth it (to me) to make an effort for homegrown cucumbers, since I find grocery store cucumbers to be perfectly acceptable (ditto grocery store carrots, melons, pumpkins, etc.) We plant basil to go with the tomatoes. Frustratingly, we STILL didn't get enough tomatoes. But, we really like tomatoes. A lot. I'm not quite sure how many would be "enough."
I finally got the tomato plants in yesterday -- a four-pack of Early Girl and a couple different interesting looking heirloom varieties. I had intended to plant some spring vegetables (sugar snap peas) and even bought the seeds, but never got them into the ground -- funny how hard it is to get motivated to garden when it's cold and dreary for most of May. Since the weekend was supposed to be nice, I ran out on Friday just before the garden store closed and bought the basics: tomato plants, basil seeds, marigolds (to repel pests) and morning glory seeds (for the trellises; this is a FRONT yard garden, so I have to have SOMETHING decorative). Oh, plus a few more herbs -- they had thyme, rosemary, and lemon grass in pots. (Now, lemon grass would be worth growing for ourselves! We cook a lot of Thai food, and those herbs-in-plastic-boxes at the grocery store are expensive.) I got it all planted in a few hours on Saturday. Now I have to get motivated to go back out for petunias sometime this week (to fill in the blank spots) and put them in the ground, and then I'll be done except for the hard part -- watering and weeding. (And the fun part -- picking and eating stuff, like tomatoes.)
My mother's garden, meanwhile, looks like something out of Midwest Home & Garden, that "look how the other half lives" publication you get bundled with Minnesota Monthly when you give money to public radio. Sigh.
--Naomi