Garden Boxes...

I had been dropping "subtle" hints to Joel that I wanted a garden!  I felt torn about it though because I knew it would take up some of the space in his beautiful yard that he worked so hard on.  He finally caved, though, and built me some raised boxes so I could try my hand at a few plants.  They ended up looking awesome and were the perfect size for my 1st garden!

 
I planted a variety of strawberry plants in 1 box and then vegetables in the other...corn, tomatoes, cucumber, green pepper, red pepper, zuchinni and jalapeno pepper.   Last summer I planted some raspberry bushes in part of our landscaping so those were ready to produce this year as well!  As the summer progressed it was so amazing to see the plants starting to grow and produce actual food!  Every day I would race home from work to check to see what happened in the garden!  

I learned a lot this year about gardening...

1.  Raspberry bushes are awesome and produce a ton of berries!  Unfortunately Japanese Beetle like to munch on their leaves.  After some research, though,  I learned you can drown them in a bucket of soapy water.  Problem solved!

2.  We have rabbits!  I barely ever see them but they are there and they like the leaves on my red peppers, green peppers and jalapeno peppers.  They killed all of my pepper plants!  Next year I will need to put a fence around it and use my new secret weapon...human hair!  Our neighbor, Frank the Barber, is my hair supplier and it seems to work.

3.  Birds like strawberries!  Who knew?  The fence is useless against them!  Next year I will have to put a net over the top or put shiny spinning items in the box to scare them away.  Joel thinks all of this is so crazy!  I think it is fun!  We didn't get many strawberries this year but we are hoping next year we will be reaping a great harvest!

4.  My zuchinni plant was in hybernation for the whole summer...then just when I had given up on it it started to produce mass quantities of zuchinni!  So exciting!

5.  Tomatoe plants get really big and produce a ton of tomatoes.  We (along with Joel's mom) really enjoyed the grape tomatoes.  We probably had 250 of them off of 1 plant!

6.  Pickling Cucumbers are for making pickles!  I know that seems obvious, but for some reason it didn't click with me when I was buying them.  I tried eating them but they were so seedy and didn't really cut it.  

All in all I loved gardening and am excited to use what I learned this year to make next year's garden even better!