Launching Garden 2009

This Saturday was all about the garden.

First, we went to a pepper and tomato show. It has tons of different varieties of peppers and tomatoes! Too bad we had already bought and planted almost all of the tomatoes and peppers that we needed. I did pick up one more tomato than we needed, mostly because I liked the name: Elfin. It is also a small tomato on a small plant, like an elf! I know, strange, but I liked it.

My dad, who loves to buy plants, and is actually the reason why we have a pepper farm on our lattice, bought 50 different varieties of tomato plants! And no... his backyard isn't that big, he just fills it with plants! Although, two of those were ones I asked him to grow for me. One was called Lisa King... and who can resist buying a plant with their name in the title. The other one was White Beauty (I think) and it was a white variety of tomatoes, and it sounded interesting.

After we bought our 6 plants, we went home, and ran various errands for the rest of the day, including a trip to Lowe's to buy some rose plants for our front planter.

When we got home, I put some of those 6 plants in pots, while Blake dug out the sago palm that was in the front planter, and then we planted three rose plants in its place.

The rest of the pictures above are of the garden currently. Blake took more earlier, but he took them all from farther away, and I prefer chronicling our plants growing with a much closer view. The best things happening lately are our first green bell pepper growing, our first tomato growing, and probably the best looking strawberry that we have ever had (already eaten, and it tasted as good as it looks!).

I love seeing all of our plants grow from day to day, and I cannot wait until summer so that I can pick all of our fresh produce!!! We are planning on being more ambitious this year than previous years with making our our pasta sauces, pickling peppers, making cucumbers, and drying both pepper and tomatoes, and overall trying to make sure that we use all of our crop (some got wasted last year), and extend how long we can enjoy the produce.

I intend (though we will see how well this goes) to keep up with posts about the garden, because I truly take a lot of pleasure in seeing the growth and looking back on where it was before.