Our First Garden

We have been married almost 14 years, and we have said for many of those years that we would like to plant a garden.  Many things prevented us with the follow-through:  living in a place that didn't allow gardens, knowledge that we would be moving in the middle of harvesting time, the initial investment, just to list a few.


We finally decided that this year was our year for the garden back in April or so.  We went to Home Depot and rented a tiller to till up our back yard.  We live in an area of Texas known for the limestone in the soil, so digging is difficult.  Raised in Virginia and with family in Ohio, I thought basements were a very common thing-not here-the limestone is too difficult to deal with, and expensive to remove.  The tilling took some time, especially since this area had never been tilled before.


Once that was done, we added a little potting soil, and planted small plants since we waited too long to plant seeds.  We planted several varieties of tomatoes, several varieties of peppers, squash, eggplant, cucumbers, okra, strawberries, watermelon, and cantalope.  I'm probably leaving some others out, but that's all I can think of at the moment.  The strawberries did not survive. 


The tomatoes and squash were the first to start growing.  I like tomato products, but am not a fan of eating a raw tomato; however, these are delicious with just a little salt.  Birds keep eating the tomatoes if we let them ripe on the vine, so as soon as they start to blush we have to pick them and let them finish ripening inside.  The squash we have eaten fried so far-a recipe from my father-in-law.  Yum!  I was starting to realize that we planted way too much for our family of four, but was not interested in canning.  We gave away a ton of produce at this point.


June is a very busy month for our family-there is literally no time to even eat at home, much less tend to a garden.  I was beginning to wonder what we were thinking planting a garden!  The weeds started taking over, but surprisingly, it was still flourishing.  We finally have had a little more time to spend on the garden, and have harvested a huge amount of veggies in the past couple weeks.  I ended up chopping and freezing some green bell peppers and some okra.  We bought some canning jars and a canner.  So far all we have canned is 1 quart of refrigerator bread and butter pickles, but we are planning for more.