The Garden is IN!

These past couple weeks the weather has given us the go-ahead to put some seeds in the dirt! Aaron tilled up part of the garden and we direct-sowed lettuce, spinach, beets, corn, and wildflower seeds. I know I started my seedlings extra early this year, but I feel like I haven't really been on top of anything else in the garden. Maybe after a few years of successful gardening our "wing-it" nature is coming out. I don't know. Yesterday I realized that planting zucchini never crossed my mind when we were sowing seeds! We only want one hill to have some to eat fresh since I still have a lot of shredded zucchini in the freezer, but since zucchini boats are one of our favorite summertime meals, I had better not forget! I still have cucumbers to plant as well, and maybe okra if I decide I want some of those too. I'll have to check my lists from previous years to make sure I'm not forgetting anything else!

Last year this time, Adam was crawling all over the place (and fast!), and it was so hard to keep him from crawling all over our mini plants. This year he's a little helper and has to do whatever daddy does, but we still have to keep an eye out for where he's walking until the plants are tall enough to see. Here he's helping plant the corn!

I'd been waiting for spinach, and it's finally coming up! I hope to freeze quite a bit.

One thing we did different this year is plant our pumpkins in pits instead of hills. They need lots of water for optimal growth when the fruit starts forming, and we though this might be a good way to keep them from drying out too quickly in the summer heat. We will be running our sprinkler again this year, but this way it should be more efficient with them being below ground level, instead of on hills above ground. I'm excited to see if it helps! The pumpkins are doing really well and are off to a great start having been planted early. We stuck them in the little greenhouse for awhile because they craved direct light even more so than other seeds I've tried growing in a kitchen window. One of the first nights out there got a little cold, so Aaron put a heater out there for the night. Problem is, we forgot to turn it off during the day until we got home later in the afternoon. We scorched a couple of plants, but the majority of them were saved.

I transplanted the tomatoes and peppers this week, and they aren't doing so swell. I'm not sure what they are needing, but the plants just look sickly. We were gone over memorial day weekend and returned to some super dry pepper plants. I lost one of four jalapeños, but the rest perked up fine with a drink. Now that they're in the garden they aren't looking very good again and I'll be lucky if any of them make it. The bell peppers all look great, thankfully. 

The tomatoes are another sad story, but I'll leave that for another day. Hopefully by then they will look better and there will be something worth capturing on camera! I need to douse them in water tonight.