Green Things!

It was hard to control the giggles when my physiotherapist asked me what I grew in my garden. 

"Um. Let's see. I've got about 100 seedlings going right now. So butternut and acorn squash, honeydew and watermelon, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. Outside I'll plant beans and peas direct to ground. And then I'm thinking beets, carrots, onions, and lettuce in a container inside the garden, since those are hard to keep weedfree.

For fruit, I've got a lime tree, a lemon tree, blackberry and raspberry bushes, a strawberry patch, two blueberry plants, and a fig tree."

Oh, and this year I'm trying asparagus, sweet potato, and grapes. I've ordered those plants."

There was a bit of silence before he started to call it intense, and I responded at the same time with "I'm hard core about this."

And that didn't include telling him about the extensive herb garden. Or the apple tree and the peach tree I've got in my backyard. 

Hard core may be an understatement. 

I start most of my plants inside from seed. I'll supplement from a local nursery once we get to May, and I've evaluated the successes and failures. 

I could stare at these seedlings all day long. It's just so amazing that I can plant something, and just four days later, they're poking up out of soil! And then, when I plant them and they produce vegetables, I'll be eating something that I quite literally grew and nurtured from seed.

My goal eventually is to be able to grow nearly everything that I need for produce from my backyard, and preserve it over the seasons. I've been fairly successful. I don't worry about lettuce, since I do like salads, but hopefully I'll get some traction this year with the onion and potato route. Sweet potatoes are supposedly easy, so I'll try those first,

Asparagus and grapes truly are new this year -- and they're the first up in planting. They've arrived, and I don't want to kill them, so they went in the ground this weekend. I have no idea what I'm doing with them -- and I certainly don't recognize that mess of roots as actual asparagus -- but I'm grateful that Burpee sends very good directions. (Their directions resulted in successful blackberries and raspberries, so something must work!)

The irony? I don't even like grapes. But I have the space, and I heard that they grew in our zone, so ... Well, it's like my usual approach to new things: "What's this red button do?"
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