In My Lovely Garden

This is our 3rd Spring/Summer in our new home. The first year, there was not even a slight chance of a garden. Last summer, I kept thinking I was going to plant one, but by the time we had the yard plant worthy, it was too late. So this year I am determined to have a garden. We have not exactly been having garden friendly weather here this spring. It has been freezing and raining. In fact, it is freezing and raining as I type. It was nice last Saturday and I tried to get everything ready to plant, but I just ran out of daylight. So on Wednesday when the skies cleared up and the rain stopped, I decided I was getting my plants in the ground no matter what.
I have only had a garden a few other times in my life, so I am far and away from being any type of expert. The years I had a garden at our old house, I just threw some of this black cloth down (I don't want anyone to think for half a second that I would spend even a minute of my summer pulling weeds), stuck some plants in the ground, set the timer on the sprinklers, and harvested the goods. That was pretty much all the effort I put into it, and stuff actually grew. I am a little nervous with this garden because we have this lovely clay like soil here. And it is so full of rocks, I will be surprised if anything grows. Not to mention the fact that, as you can clearly see from the pictures, we put it right next to the trail. And well, you know what happens on and mostly off of that trail. Yep. We're just pretty much settin' ourselves up for failure with that one.

In an effort to actually get the garden planted on Wednesday (because it was supposed to rain Thursday, but I don't remember if it actually did or not), I enlisted the help of my cute little girlies. They were a big help and they actually planted most of the plants. Zac didn't help only because I stuck him on the mower to mow the weeds, uh, I mean lawn.

It was pretty late by the time we finished and we were all tired, but so happy with ourselves. It was beautiful! We took baths and got all tucked snug in bed and had a sweet nights sleep.

I woke up at 6:00 the next morning, walked into my kitchen, looked out the window, and this is what I found:

At that moment, my brain could not process this. So I went into my bedroom, turned on Oprah, and folded a couple loads of laundry. By the time I finished, I was ready to handle the situation. I woke Zac up so he could get ready for school, and I woke the girls up earlier than normal and drug their sleepy booties outside and made them help me fix this mess.

I had used the stakes that came with this fabric and added some rocks to hold it down. But apparently the stakes are pretty much worthless and it was pretty windy over night. And when it is windy here, believe me, it's windy. Thankfully that huge pile of rocks that I loaded up in the wheelbarrow last summer and walked across the trail and dumped on the empty lot were still there. I did however find it ironic that I was once again loading them up and bringing them back into my yard. We also located every inch of scrap lumber and metal fence stakes to hold that fabric down. We had to poke all the plants back through the holes and about half of the plants were fine, and half were pretty damaged, but mostly just the tops. The base of the stems seem to be fine so hopefully they will grow OK.


So now, I am pretty confident that that garden is not going to fly away again with all the crap I have holding it down. However, it is totally white trash looking. And just last week I made Steve and the kids de-white trash the chicken coop and chicken run. I kinda feel like if the garden is gonna be white trash, we should re-white trash the coop. Because if you're gonna go white trash, you might as well go all out.