grow my own vegetables

I love cultivating my green thumb, and growing vegetables is such a sustainable way of doing it. Flowers are nice to look at, but vegetables are edible, often cheaper than flowers when buying seedlings, reduce your cost at the grocery store or farmers market, and provide better nutrition than most of the conventionally, commercially grown produce. Growing organic was not very difficult, either – at least not as difficult as I thought it would be. Marigolds help with pest control, and there are some other little tricks you can use to keep pests away and to keep soil healthy.

I’m grateful for my first harvest, and look forward to the bounty to continue this summer. I’ll definitely be planting my own vegetables again.

Partaking of the first fruit.

My first fruit. Well, veggie. :) There are a lot more veggies almost ready to be picked!

...because I just ate my first homegrown cucumber – and it was delicious! My garden is a success! I showed the earth a little love, and it provided nourishment back. It feels wonderful to be part of this very primal, very humbling process. Pictures to come soon.

I checked my plants last night, and my first tomato has appeared! Grow, little tomato, grow!

I’m trying very hard to organically grow my garden, which is hard to do when you keep running into slugs (thank you for leaving slime trails so I know where to put the salt….) and your plants and soil don’t look nearly as nice as the plants two plots over that have been very diligently sprayed with chemical after chemical. I keep telling myself that this is long, noble road, and my veggies will thank me later.

I did mix up some “manure tea” this morning, and it will brew for the next 24 hours. Not as glamorous, to be sure, as simply spraying crap all over the garden, but you certainly feel a..um…connection?...to the world when you’re digging through sheep shit. ;)

Some of my seeds have sprouted! I was a little nervous because we received an astronomical amount of rain, and some people in my community plot have lost some seeds or plants. There is very little drainage, but my little seeds were OK. I now have green beans and sugar snap peas coming up.

I planted three different types of tomatoes, two different types of peppers, cucumbers, green beans, and peas on Sunday. This is my first attempt at growing my own vegetables, so once I get the first veggie off the vine, I’ll happily consider this goal complete, with the unspoken goal of trying it again and again as I learn more about gardening.

...for planting! I bought some locally-made compost, dug out some trenches so the whole thing doesn’t flood (and so I have some place to walk), turned over the soil, and removed some detritus from last year’s garden tender. I’ll start planting soon. So excited for my first garden!

First step down, many more to go, but my apartment complex is going to assign me a garden plot. It’ll probably be 2×2 or something small like that, but I can’t wait to care for this little piece of land and grow things. I can’t wait to go sit out there and relax my mind on nice summer evenings after work. Yay!