How Does Your Garden Grow?

I was much like a little kid on Christmas morning this past Friday when my box of plants that I ordered finally arrived! My strawberry plants (all 50 of them) and my raspberry plants were finally here. Turns out that I had misread the fine print when ordering those raspberry plants. I thought I had six on the way. Thankfully this was not the case. So we ended up with three. However when those bad boys take off I will be happy to get starts for everyone who was interested! Right now they look more like sticks coming out of the ground than anything.

As promised, I did take some pictures of our nifty little SFG (square foot garden). The Foolish One and her hubby came by to pick up her strawberry plants and wanted to see our latest endeavor. It was while happily showing her that I discovered we actually have turnips and radishes coming up! Today it is even more of a thrill because there is evidence that the peas and beans are coming up as well. Hell yeah. We may have green thumbs after all. We're still hopeful with the carrots (although there is evidence of one lone carrot pushing it's way through the top soil).

Today my husband indulged me by building me one more box for those raspberries!

He is wonderful! Working diligently as I played gopher to his handyman and farmer skills. (Look, Hoochie!!! I have evidence... LOL.) Who would have thought that planting three little plants would have required a day's worth of digging and rearranging? He never complained once and I made sure to supply him with cold iced tea and cigarettes on demand. Mack is cheap and easily bribed :)

There it is... the completed bed for the raspberries. See those sticks? All that hard work and we won't see even one berry until next year. Stay tuned to see if the "fruits" of our labor are rewarded. Sorry, bad pun, but ya know I had to go there.

There it is! A SFG in all it's compact glory. We're playing around with the flagstones between the beds. Not sure if they'll stay but right now a lack of groundcover makes for one muddy mess after a good rain or after watering the garden (which takes about 10 minutes). If we like the flagstones we plan on planting some irish moss in between them. Best part? It needs NO mowing! I'm all for that. Not that it took any amount of time to do that job anyway. For the six years I've lived in the townhouse I've taken care of that particular task with my electric weedeater in about 15 to 20 minutes.

Those containers are the herb garden. The terra cotta one on the right is our dwarf blueberry bush and the other is overflow of strawberry plants that wouldn't fit in the hanging bags.

Those bags are the reason that I ended up with an insane amount of strawberries to plant. But they hold 10 plants apiece and aren't taking up any of our limited ground space.

Not bad for a few weekends worth of work, eh? I won't even show ya what the rest of the yard looks like because it looks very much like a construction site. When that side looks nearly as good as the garden site then I'll post some bragging pics. Of course as the garden progresses I'll be sure and post some pics of what will hopefully be some pretty greenery with produce snapshots to follow.

Many thank you's to The Foolish One and her hubby for taking those surplus berry plants off our hands!! But oh... the jams we will make and the berries we will freeze!