First Garden Post (How It All Started)

After spending many nights poring over different vegetable gardening blogs, I came to this conclusion that I wanted a blog of my own to chronicle my gardening progress this year.

I have been a city girl all my life and never learned to garden before. Some people grow up with gardening parents, grandparents, or even relatives who live out in the "country" (where they surely garden) whom they visit every summer. Not me. I spent my whole life living in apartments or houses with tiny backyards in urban settings. The closest I ever got to vegetable gardening was going to the local farmer's market (I know, not really the same thing). So I really had zero exposure to actual gardening.

Then sometime last year, I got this idea in my head that I wanted to try growing my own herbs (training-vegetables?), and mentioned it to my boyfriend.  Keith, being the good man that he is, totally surprised me with my first herb growing setup for my birthday.  I didn't really know what I was doing with watering, transplanting and growing, but some of the herbs actually survived and became edible. Now I was inspired, and ready to move on to "real" vegetables.

This year, I found out about square foot gardening while researching backyard vegetable gardening. So we (and by we, I mean Keith) built three 4' x 4' boxes and set out about planting.

Three Square Foot Gardening beds on May 2, 2010

With great newbie enthusiasm, I quickly planted lettuce, spinach, onions, carrots, peas, green beans, squash, cucumbers, and a few others. As I continued my research about vegetable gardening, though, it wasn't long before I realized that planning should actually take longer than planting. I learned that lettuce, spinach, and peas like cool weather, but OH NO, I already planted them and the hot summer was fast approaching. Wait, just how big does a squash plant get? And onions, what's this about about long and short day sets? Ack.

Then came the bunnies.