Our Garden

Back in late March, early April, I started sprouting some tomato and cabbage seeds on my kitchen windowsill, and John plowed under the garden spot, though we woudn't plant until after Easter (when the danger of frost *should* have passed).

We've not tried growing cabbage before, so not sure how/if those will turn out. I only started six plants, but we are down to four now.

We ended up with LOTS of tomato plants, though. Four rows, Yikes!  It happened because they advise you to sow three seeds per peat pod, and hope to get one. If you get more, weed the smaller/weaker ones out. I'm not so good at wasting what looked like perfectly plants, though, so I broke them apart and transplanted into larger cups and ended up with a whole lot of them. About three times more than we've had before.
However, we've been having a pretty active weather season so far, with high winds and tornado threats, so I'm not counting my chickens - everyone of them could easily be wiped by a hail storm next week.

This is Iglesius (don't ask; son named it).  I can't really explain too well why I wanted a scarecrow, other than it's kind of old-school traditional to have a scarecrow in the garden, even though we didn't have hay or overalls.  It was just, last year I thought the garden looked...interesting, with all the different things to see in it. There was 10 foot tall sunflowers, a cherry-tomato-box-frame thing, a post in the middle that had a water-sprinkler on it before it was taken off and replaced with a bird feeder later.  I don't know, it's weird, whatever.
It's not really as much a scarecrow as, the idea was to make it look like a farmer in his garden picking veggies. I'm looking for an old, red market basket to attach to his hand.  Although, I guess at this point I could stand an old hoe up against him and make him look like he's working in the garden.
I just like different, interesting, decorative things in the garden to give it some interest.

This is the garden at the moment. The two rows closest are cucumbers. John put up the posts and chicken-wire for the cuke-vines to climb. Before, they'd run all out into the yard and then we coudn't cut the grass and it'd overtake the cuke-vines. So hopefully we can contain them this year.
Behind those are four cabbage plants and three sweet banana pepper. Behind that is a couple rows of corn. Then cherry tomatoes, Iglesius, and three more pepper plants. The whole south side is the four rows of tomatoes.  We planted sunflower seeds along the east side again, but they didn't come up (or they did and I *weeded* them out. I am bad to not be able to the tell the difference between weeds and plants, which is why I start mine inside, so I know what they look like!).

Gardening is such a satisfying undertaking, and the benefits are numerous: saves you money, good for your health - physical and mental both - and it's a great family activity.  Everyone should at least try it. Even if you only have a balconey or small patio, you could grow tomatoes or peppers or cucumbers/squash/beans in a 5-gallon bucket.