How does your garden grow?

After a month of saying every weekend that we really need to get our garden planted, we finally did it today. In the past I've started some or all of my vegetables from seed but this year we just bought starts. We aren't very good gardeners, mainly because after we first get it planted we tend not to be super consistent with maintenance, thus the purchase of starts because it doesn't involve thinning out the plants. (Last year I never got around to thinning out the lettuce and it was a huge mess).

The whole garden-- the stuff on the ground is hay, to try and combat the weed problems we had last year-- it rained all summer and we had out of control weeds!

We started out the day at the best nursery ever: Flowerworld. If you live in the Seattle area I highly recommend Flowerworld, even if you aren't gardening. The store area alone is 3 acres, and they also have chickens, peacocks, geese, swans, goats and sheep you can visit, along with nearly every kind of Northwest growing plant you can think of. It's one of our favorite places.

We just recently put up some heavy duty net fencing to keep the chickens out of the garden-- they dig everything up and love rainbow chard in particular so much that there's never any left for me! They were very frustrated watching M dig in the garden and not able to get in to "help."



We planted a few sweet peas, and corn (though in 4 years we have never had a successful corn harvest-- the squirrels tend to get it all), rainbow chard, several kinds of lettuce, bell peppers, tomatoes, and collard greens. They did not have the kind of kale I like at Flowerworld, probably because it's more of a cool weather crop, so we skipped that. When it gets warmer I want to plant some basil in a pot by the back door-- last year we had a cold summer and all the basil died-- the deck gets warmer so perhaps we'll be more successful with a pot.