Mommy Tanya Writes: Our Garden

You know how some people have green thumbs? They can make any thing grow? I seem to have the opposite effect, a black thumb... the black thumb of death... I look at a plant and it dies. Ask the poor African Violet my friends gave me. Ohh wait you can't he's DEAD.

Despite my handicap I decided to give growing a vegetable garden a try. The back of the yard was already set for one, with neat rows and wooden planks separating the rows. So while the naughties were gone my sister and I tackled our respective gardens. Utah received a ridiculous amount of rain and snow this year and so the weeds have been astronomical. Here are pictures of the garden before we started:

We rented a tiller from Home Depot and spent an entire Friday weeding and tilling and half killing ourselves getting both gardens weed-free and ready to be planted. Sorry I don't have an after picture - I could barely move and I had the worst sun burn of my life.

I took the advice of more seasoned gardeners and covered my newly tilled ground with black painters plastic to 1) cut down on weeding and 2) keep water from evaporating. I then cut holes and planted my tomato, onion, pepper, and chive starters and my zucchini and lettuce seeds. It snowed the next day and killed everything. BLACK THUMB OF DEATH!

With attempt two I used slightly more mature starters. I still lost some (including poor Peeta my pepper plant) and some came back to life after I was sure they were goners. In the end I have managed to not kill: 3 tomato plants, 4 pepper plants, 4 broccoli plants, one small row of lettuce, an unknown number of onions, basil, cilantro (which is doing some really weird things), mint, rosemary, and 5-6 zucchinis (best vegetable for beginners because they grow like weeds).

Here are pictures from June 8th right after I planted everything post-freeze: