Garden Debut

I woke up at 7:00 this morning and spent the first three hours of my day in the garden! Yesterday, it was all I could do to get the giant dandelion weeds and crabgrass out of the raised bed. I quickly found out that gardening can be quite a workout under the right conditions. So, I took a break...for almost 24 hours.

This morning I got to work on the fun part - the planting. We are now the proud owners of our very own vegetable garden that will hopefully produce Roma tomatoes, bell peppers, green beans and Sugar Baby watermelons. If I had room for more, I would plant zucchini and yellow summer squash, but they require so much ground space and I can't spare it this year. Let's just hope that what I did plant stays healthy and actually produces fruit!

I have a feeling this first garden is going to teach me a lot. I look at the little mounds for the watermelon, the rows of beans and the scrawny pepper and tomato plants and hope that they'll just make it through the season. Should I water them right away? I don't know! (I did.) Should I add coffee grounds to the soil? Compost? One website says to mulch. I've never heard of this for vegetables. Do people really mulch bell peppers?

I know just about as much about vegetable gardening as I do about flowers. It's all a guessing game at this point. However, I tried my hand at flower gardening this morning as well. The previous owner of the house had some perfectly healthy pansies planted in the brick planter boxes behind the house on the edge of the patio. And they really were healthy - just terribly far apart. Pansies like to be crowded and there was too much unused space between plants. Besides, I'm not the biggest fan of pansies. The colors don't thrill me. SO... I ripped those suckers out and replaced them with hot pink geraniums, bright white petunias, and leafy Vinca vines. I wanted the look of a pile of flowers - buckets of blooms. And petunias are downright weed-like when given the right conditions. My hope is that these three sun-loving varieties will really take off and perform much better than the cooler weather loving pansies.