Jami Successfully Gardens

I grew a zucchini! I am eating it now! I know that to most people, this does not sound like a reason for an entire blog post, but here's the thing - it's my first zucchini. It's the first thing I've successfully grown, in my memory. So here's the tale. . . . . . . Occasionally, I get crazy ideas in my head that won't go away. This spring, the idea I had was: plant a vegetable garden. There were numerous reasons for this idea, including that I like food and food is expensive. I therefore asked the Husband if, for Mothers' Day, he would create a place for me in the backyard where I could garden. He gave me that look that I have learned means he recognizes that I am having one of those ideas. Several days later, I reiterated, I really, really do want a garden. Honest. Gonna grow some veggies. He shrugged. Mothers' Day rolled around and I got . . . a gorgeous locket. Shocked, I told the Husband that I hadn't expected anything, but he said he'd wanted to get it and that Eddie helped pick it out. A month later, I still had no garden, while the Husband tried to figure out where and how he was going to do that in our yard. I suspect he may also have been waiting for this weird idea to pass, but sadly (for him) it didn't. I bought seeds and gardening gloves. He put in my garden. It's small. Just the area under where our shed used to be. Eddie and the Husband turned over the soil, pulled out the rocks, cut some wood to frame it and poured down some top soil. I joyfully planted my seeds. I planted zucchini, snap peas, bell peppers and hot peppers. These are the veggies I like best, and also I'd heard that zucchini are easy to grow and being basically a gardening idiot, it seemed like a good place to start. God understands that not only did I have no idea what I was doing, but also that I have a low level of frustration. I worried that if the gardening was too hard that I'd become disenchanted with it. So He sent a week of solid rain immediately after we planted it and BAM! I had sprouts like crazy. I assumed some were weeds, but if it was green and growing, I cheered it on. I finally figured out which were future foodstuffs and which were garden invaders (thanks, Google!), and removed the offending weeds. I watered them once the rains stopped. I made a make-shift trellis for the peas to grow. I thinned out the weaker plants. I moved the extra pea plants into pots, because I couldn't bear to toss them. I mourned the poor peppers which 1. needed more heat and less rain and 2. got mostly obliterated by the zucchini, which started to look fairly jungle-ish. My neighbor, clearly a more experienced gardener, noticed my frequently visits to my fledgling plants. "Whatcha got growing there?" Me: Zucchini, some hot peppers, snap peas Her: Uh, how many zucchini plants do you have there? Me: I don't know 10 or 12? Her: TEN OR TWELVE??? PLANTS?? (at this point she was making the same incredulous face that all you experienced zucchini growers are making) Me: Uh, sure. We like zucchini. She then went on to explain to me that she has one zucchini plant and at the time had 4 good zucchinis developing. I must say, I had not really thought that far ahead. Basically, since I didn't know what the heck I was doing, I'd pretty much put every seed I had in the ground and hoped something would come up. At one point, I had a panic moment where I counted more than 40 buds on the zucchini plants. The nice neighbor assured me that not all the buds become zucchini - some flower and that's all. Last week I saw little zucchinis starting. Today, while I was out, Eddie and the Husband discovered that one of them had reached more than 10 inches in length, and when I came home, they couldn't wait to show me. I checked Google again, yes, that's big enough to pick (even too big, according to some of the sites)! There are a few teensy tiny hot-peppers-to-be. No recognizable pea pods yet, but I am heartened by the deliciousness of my first ever zucchini. I am a gardener!