Wade Family: The Garden

So this year my sister-in-laws and I decided to do a garden together. We started out planning to do it in Rebecca's backyard because she has the most space for one, but we ended up using some ground that a neighbor from church leases for a small fee. We thought this may work better in case nothing grew and we had just torn up Rebecca's backyard for nothing. So one weekend in early May we went out to start planting. The space that we had to use was much bigger than we planned on, but that was okay we could just use part of it. Also, we had an abundance of different seeds but we soon learned that we had missed the planting time for a few of our seeds. We may try those in the fall, but we shall see how the rest of the summer goes. The first things we put out were watermelon, cantaloupe, yellow squash, zucchini, and cucumbers. We had started tomatoes and peppers inside, but they were not strong enough to transplant yet. Needless to say we did not know what we were doing. We were following a book and even then we were just winging it. The guy whose land we are using(Bud) had said he put down shredded paper in between the plants to help retain moisture and keep weeds from growing as much. Since we didn't have shredded paper we thought maybe sheets would just work. I don't know how much it has done, but it does look funny.

These pictures were after planting the first plants.

The beginning of cantaloupe.

After a couple of weeks we came back and planted the tomatoes and pepper transplants. Bud came out with a huge bag of shredded paper that he put down around the tomatoes. I guess he felt sorry for us with our paper sheets. In the row to the left of the tomatoes we planted carrots, onions, and lettuce. Who knows what we did, but none of that grew. We have since replanted that row with beans and they have come up pretty nicely.

Our first round of watermelon seeds bombed completely. They are the hills on the far left. We replanted with some new seeds and this time they all came up. Two of the cantaloupe hills came up so we let those be. All of the squash, most of the zucchini, and a few cucumbers came up really well. That is the row in the middle.

As we soon realized we had a large amount of land to weed since we spread the garden out so much. We didn't think that through very well. We decided to let the ground we weren't using just go to weed and concentrated on the rows between the plants. That is proving to be quite enough to keep up with.