Gardening

This year, we are planting our first garden.

It's been a lot of work. The house that we've purchased has been a bit neglected for the last few years. It's seen a few changes of ownership and some renters. It isn't in the worst of shape (trust me, we saw a LOT worse while we were house-hunting), but it definitely needs some love.

I keep forgetting to take "before" pictures, but I'm remembering to take "after" pictures most of the time.

Grig loves fresh asparagus, so we're trying to plant some. It took us some time to figure out where we wanted it. We finally decided to plant it right in front of the shed. Here's what that spot looked like when we first bought the house:

After a few hours work and some dismantling of a broken picnic table, here is the after:

Before planting the asparagus 

After planting the asparagus

We think it looks a ton better. Hopefully our asparagus blooms. We're learning a lot about gardening. My family has always had a garden, and I've always helped (most of the time, anyway), but I've never been in charge of the garden before. My dad has quite the green thumb. It seems like he can make anything grow.

Asparagus is a perennial vegetable. It is one of the few that will grow back every year for up to 20 years. However, it doesn't always take root and you can't eat it for the first couple of years while it establishes itself. We're going to put up a fence around it to keep the dog and kid out, but we didn't finish planting the asparagus until late Monday night.

Monday, we also planted our onions. The garden is ready for us to plant more, but we wanted to get the vegetables planted that would go bad if we waited too long.

Here's what our garden looked like when we moved in:

You can't really tell, but it was really overgrown and covered with grass. Here's what it looks like after Monday nights planting:

The dark, wet side is where the onions are planted. Hopefully we're going to plant the rest of our first crop tomorrow.

We're pretty excited and hoping that all of this effort yields some fruit (or rather, vegetables).

We had a minor miracle while we were trying to get all this figured out. We couldn't get our hose faucet that's attached to the house to turn on. Everything seemed to be hooked up properly, but for some reason, it wasn't working.

We didn't want to plant our crops until we had a working hose for watering, so even though we bought the seeds and sets on the 10th, we didn't plant them that weekend.

It turned out to be a good thing, because the next week, it snowed over a foot! Welcome to April in Utah.

It snowed for two days straight, and then it all melted. We were worried about our apple blossoms, but they seem to be doing just fine.

The next day after the snow melted, I figured out where I needed to turn on the water in order to make the hose work. I really felt like the timing was incredible. We planted last night, and the onion and asparagus seemed to still be alive.

Gardening is more fun that it was when I was a kid. It's exciting to find out if you can make things grow.

Historically, I have more of a black thumb. I've killed more plants than I've grown. Hopefully, as I learn more, I can inherit a little of my father's green thumb.

That's what I'm hoping for anyway.