Our growing garden…

We’ve been super busy lately (as always), but we have been spending a lot of our free time and evenings working on the garden. Last week Craig finished the mulch and everything looks great. There were a few nights where he worked past dark, and our light that overlooks the back yard is set on motion and it only stays lit for like 10 seconds, so that was no help. He was also working 10 hours days last week, so I really appreciate him staying up late working on it. It paid off!

Every night when I get home from work I try to do a little weeding in each bed and then I water everything (if it hasn’t rained). I’m trying really hard to have a successful garden this year! I’m no expert, and this year is definitely an experiment. My only experience gardening was from my childhood (my grandma had a huge garden on our farm that I would help with, or maybe I HAD to help….), and gardening was also a part of my internship last year. We had a garden on campus, and we also taught students from different schools around STL how to garden and gave them nutrition lessons. I’m thankful to have a yard to grow a garden; a lot of the students we taught did not even have a yard.

So here is what we’re working with:

I’m trying watermelon this year. Once the plant sprawls out more, we’ll remove the fence if needed. It will continue to keep the bunnies out until then!

Here are the tomatoes on the close end, cherry tomatoes on the far end, cucumbers in the middle (left), and acorn squash growing on the green trellis in the middle (kind of hard to see):

From the other end:

Zucchini on the close end, two eggplants in the middle, and potatoes on the far end:

From the other end:

And this is what I like to call the pepper patch (with one lonely eggplant):

From the other end:

And here is the lettuce and bean bed. Romaine in the front, salad mix in the middle, edemame on the far left row, green beans (bush) on the far right row, and two different types of green beans (pole) on the trellis at the end of the bed:

From the other end:

I think I’ll be canning a lot of green beans this summer! I had a feeling the trellis that I had found at my parents’ house wasn’t going to be tall enough, so I bought four 6’ poles on Monday. It is now Wednesday and the beans on the right have already wrapped themselves to the top! Grandma Kay if you’re reading this, the Helda’s are growing much faster than the Melba’s!

Well that’s it for now. Cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and pepper plants are slowing starting to flower, looking forward to some produce!

Hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend! We had another wedding this weekend, my friend Brad Koester married his beautiful wife Jessica and the reception was at Missouri Botanical Gardens, so pretty and fun! It was also my first weekend on administrative duty at work, which I will have to do every 16 weekends since I am a department head. It stinks that I had to do it on Memorial Day weekend, however it was great because I did not have any call-offs! If any one from housekeeping, dietary, activity, or nursing calls off, is even one minute late, or leaves early the day before, of, or after a holiday, they do not get their holiday pay, which is double time. So in a way, having duty on the weekend is not such a bad thing because no one wants to lose their holiday pay so there are hardly ever call-offs on the holiday weekend.

I will leave you with a few pictures I stole off Facebook, because I failed to take any pictures at Kortney’s wedding last weekend. The day was gorgeous (it didn’t storm like it was forecasted to), the party bus road trip was amazing, and the reception was a BLAST! Congrats to Craig and Kortney!