Update on our Garden

When we planted our garden back in July, we had 2 different tomato plants, 2 identical cucumber plants, a strawberry plant, and a golden zucchini plant...because it seems everyone has zucchini coming out of their ears because it's easy to grow, and I wanted to feel successful. Yeah, I'm weird like that.

Since we needed to get more soil for the pot that the strawberries were supposed to go in, I just planted it with the others until we could make it back to Home Depot. It died within 2 days. I put it back in the original container with the intent on taking it back when we went to go get more soil. It's been 3 months, and we've never made it back to Home Depot. It's still sitting in the container, dead. {Laziness, you may think. Maybe. Or maybe the inability to find a time in which Eddie could make it there that was not during rush hour...killer here. But I can't lift those bags of soil. Fact.}

First out of the gates were the cucumbers. They went crazy! Before I knew it, I had a couple full grown cucumbers, that we cut up and enjoyed. But that was the last the family had any interest in them. Pretty soon,  we had 2 more, then 4 more, then more and more and more! So I've just been giving them away as fast as I pick them. I did hold onto 2 a few weeks ago, but no one ate them and they went bad :-( The plant itself had  reached out of the box and was all the way to the trampoline and intertwined in our A/C unit. Next time, I think one plant will suffice! A couple weeks ago, I finally bought some trellises to contain them so we could mow the lawn. I'm trying to think of how many cucumbers we've picked so far and I think we've picked a couple dozen...and they're still growing.

The zucchini didn't fair as well. I think it's been choking itself or something. There are still living parts on it, but most times it starts to bring forth fruit, it grows a couple inches...then slowly shrivels up and dies. We managed to get one full grown zucchini. I didn't even get a picture because I thought there would be many more...but none so far. I'm not sure if any more will come. Definitely not what I expected.

I got the tomatoes with the expectation to not have a high expectation. Many veteran gardeners in the ward have just not had success with their tomatoes here, mainly because we are restricted to container gardening here on base. I thought I'd try anyways. I'm glad that I did. We have at least a dozen, of varying stages, growing right now, and today, this guy was ready to leave the vine!

So for our first family garden, in our little 2X8 box in our backyard, I'd say we did pretty good!

See the small red box in front? That's the strawberry corpse...