Our Gardening Adventures

Angela and I have always wanted a garden and fruit trees. We have had many misadventures on our way.  

First in our apartment in Provo we decided we would grow our own tomatoes. We got some tomato starters and planted them in some pots outside of our apartment in Provo. They grew really well, but then they developed a fungus. They also got too heavy for the pots and kept falling over. So in the end we got no edible tomatoes.

We tried several experiments in our Houston apartment, including planting a peach pit and a pineapple top. Both failed!
We then tried to grow some onions.  We babied these onions for a whole year. We moved them from Houston to Temple and finally harvested them last summer.

I know, pretty pathetic, but they were sweet and tasty.  Our first, and pretty much only gardening success.

Last summer, you may recall, my father-in-law and I built a raised garden.  We composted a bunch of our fruit and randomly the cantaloupe stated growing. They grew like weeds, unfortunately they never fruited.  So unless pretty green vines count, the cantaloupe was another gardening failure.

Last summer we also planted a Zuccini starter. It grow really well, until a rabbit ate it! (little flopsy)

This year we were determined to get our farmer on, and grow something eatable. We were really excited to find a nursery near our house.  There is actually only one that we can find in the Temple/Belton area.  It's right off of Main street by HEB.  They had peach trees, which we were very excited to try.

Digging the whole proved to be way more work than expected.  It seems that when a new house is sodded they do not bother moving any rocks from the yard.  They just plant right on top of them.  So, in the end, there were so many rocks in this hole that I had to abandon my shovel and had to use a garden fork.  At the bottom of the hole I met my greatest challenge. A 50 pound behemoth. It took me over an hour just to pry it out.  The silver lining is that I had another nice huge rock for the flower bed.

Christine had a blast collecting "Macaroni rocks" from the hole to feed them to turtle. (We have no idea why she calls small rocks macaroni rocks, but she does, and she loves collecting them.) Jacob wanted to participate a little more in the fun, but was restricted to his car seat.

Thus far the peach tree has been doing well.  It had beautiful pink blossoms on it.  We attempted to protect it from the late frosts this year, wrapping it in plastic tarps and surgical gowns.  It seems to have survived and has at least 3 good sized peaches growing on it!

When we went to the Nursery to buy our peach tree we saw they had beautiful strawberry plants for sale. We bought 5 or 6 of them. We planted them, naively dreaming of a huge strawberry patch taking off in our back yard.  We ate one strawberry they had already produced. That night it was going to be cold, so I covered them up and tucked them in.  No sooner had the sun come up then the flies started attacking the plants.  The plants were too young to have insecticide sprayed on them, so I sprayed the plants around them and hung some fly paper up.  That night another frost hit, and when we went to check on our fly eaten, baby strawberry plants, the rabbits had eaten them down to the ground!!  So much for our strawberry patch! Our starters barely lasted a day!  This story might have been our worst gardening failure, had it not been for a nice nursery who gave us two more strawberry plants to plant in pots and protect.  These strawberry plants had a little frost damage, but are now doing well.

These last few months we have tried planting seeds in the garden directly, and then tried growing the seeds inside when our first planting was unsuccessful.  After trying to transplant our small seedlings to the garden and having them die. We tried again. We also planted some more seeds. We planted some starters, and we planted some vegetable left-overs.  So far the vegetable leftovers have done the best. Half of an onion is growing quite well. The bottom of a celery stalk has shot up some leaves, and left over garlic cloves are doing amazing! Last night there were two baby rabbits in the garden, so we'll see how long this vegetable garden lasts.