Little Garden

Anyone who knows me, knows I have a black thumb...seriously. Kids and critters of all kinds I can feed/fix/heal/grow, but I tend to kill most green plant life I come in contact with. One look at my pathetic little 6 stems of what should be compact-car sized Christmas cactus, that I've had for 12 years no less, is the proof. One day I will post my sister's CC and mine, which are both from the same original plant, for comparison. Pretty embarrassing just to think about it maybe I'll hold off on that thought. Would probably be the final nail in the coffin for my poor CC.

As poor as my growing skills are, I tend to do better with outdoor plants, probably because it rains enough that mother nature does the watering when I either don't have time or remember about midnight that I should have watered the poor dying vegetation, so when we use to have a decent size garden in SC, it did pretty well. We usually had enough zucchini and peppers to share and enough cucumbers for Mr. FixIt to make approximately 400 batches of freezer pickles. (I don't like pickles.) So even with my lack of garden skill and horribly dry soil with clay an inch down, our gardens usually turn out ok.

Usually.

The last large garden we had in SC, I was pregnant with Monster Man, had spent almost a week getting soil turned, fertilized and rows ready, and planted a mess of beans, carrots, peppers, zucchini, cukes and watermelon....which a sudden severe thunderstorm, deluge of water and tornado destroyed in about an hour. Dang. Most of the seeds were floating, then flowing away in the deep water. I was sick, all that work, which was done during my only spare time I could muster during daylight in 90-degree heat which meant my work had to be done late evening and during the night, dog-tired that week. Time, labor and loss of sleep for nothin'. I did have a few sparse carrots and beans that survived, but the true survivors were the cukes and zucchini since they were in tall mounds. I was so ticked off the only thing I did the rest of the summer was go out and cuss the plants that weren't there every few days. Those remaining plants hung on just to spite me and produced enough for us eat that summer and some to share with neighbors.

Monster man coming along late that summer, the next spring was a horrible drought, a 700-mile move the next summer, and two cold Ohio summers later, I finally am giving a garden another shot. A very small garden, only about 5x10 and less than a fourth of our SC gardens, is in the works. Mr. FixIt helped turn all the soil, the kids helped work in some new soil and fertilizer and we planted some cucumbers, beans, carrots and two tomato plants. It has rained nonstop so they sprouted in about 4 days...

One cucumber mound (I know I need to thin out a few)

A few beans sprouting.

Even wildflowers!! Woohoo! These are in the front yard in an area that was covered with ivy/ground cover stuff that apparently hadn't been thinned/tamed/dealt with in the past 15 years so the soil is a bit scary even with the added soil/fertilizer, but we'll see what happens.

I'll keep you posted, but don't get your hopes up. I could be showing pics of brown deceased items at any given moment.