Spontaneously Creative: Garden 2016

Last year our garden kind of fell by the wayside. I had the best of intentions, but once the morning sickness monster of pregnancy reared it's ugly head, I had no desire at all to look after the garden, let alone harvest the food that grew. We also had a small problem with a certain vegetarian staffie helping himself to the cucumbers and squash as soon as they were big enough to eat. Who knew dogs could be vegetarians?

If you've followed my garden posts in the past, then you know I'm usually super organized to the point of being anal, with my graph paper and drawing out plant-o-grams. If you have no idea what I'm talking about I'll link to my past garden posts at the end of this post. Well this year I went with the "I'm going to get me some plants and plant them" method.

The first improvement you'll notice about our garden is our ever so classy plastic green fence. Like I said, we had a staffie problem last year and unfortunately there is no spray to keep it at bay, so we were forced to put up a fence. Granted the green plastic is a lot more appealing than the orange plastic I thought we were going to be stuck with, but it's still an eyesore. But I'm willing to deal with the ugliness if that means we get some delicious fresh food!

Before heading off to the garden centre I made sure to ask Roman several times what he wanted to plants in the garden. If you have kids then you understand the importance of asking a toddler the same question several times. You don't go with the response you get, but rather the average number of times they say the same thing. Roman was adamant that we had to plant broccoli, strawberries, watermelon and pickles (cucumbers). I've been wanting to give potatoes a try and of course we have to plant tomatoes, so that only left a few spaces left in the garden for whatever random plants I came upon.

When all was said and done, this is what ended up in our garden this year.
- potatoes, and a lot of them      - carrots
- tomatoes                                  - broccoli
- cucumbers                               - brussel sprouts
- zucchini                                   - watermelon
- jalapeno peppers                     - strawberries
- chives (because even the zombie apocalypse won't kill these plants)

As you can guess I don't stand my garden from seed. Quite frankly I just don't have the patience, so I prefer to pay a little more and get the actual plant. The only thing I had to buy seeds for was the carrots (obviously) and watermelon. I've tried growing watermelon in the past and didn't have much luck, so hopefully these seeds fair better. We also have some raspberries popping up through the fence. There is a bush in the alley along our yard but I guess the sun is nicer on our side. We'll leave them for now, but if they get really invasive then they'll have to go.

As I type this post the garden has actually been in for about a month and we have already harvest a bit of food! We actually cut off a couple good size stalks of broccoli, Roman ate the few strawberries we had, and I've given away stacks of chives because it was so big that it was laying on top of the carrots. Obviously different plants are going to be ready at different times, so I think I'll just post a collective "harvest" post at the end of the growing season.