The Vicars: The Gardener's Life

I'm completely alone and it is Father's Day. So, to keep myself distracted from the sadness of this situation I am going to post a very time-consuming blog update on our garden.

I just realized the last photos I posted of our garden were from its itty-bitty days. I need to catch you back up! So as my close friend and confidant, Julie Andrews, likes to say: Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start....

Here it is at the start in early April. The two plants are a tomatoe and pepper plant, which we're bought already started. The rest of the garden is full of hidden seeds :)

Life! It really is a marvelous sight to watch a bunch of tiny, dry seeds you plop into the ground come up as such different forms of life :)

We added an addition for our strawberry plants (which we transplanted from the front)

At the end of May we went with Zach's family to the East Coast. While we were gone, the summer heat/sun kicked in. When we came back--our garden had exploded in growth!!

I suppose I should explain its contents. We have 5 tomatoe plants, cucumber, one bell pepper plant, one hot pepper plant, onions, carrots, lettuce, corn and strawberries

This is the most recent picture. Our corn is tasseling!!! Hopefully they all spread enough to fertilize eachother. Otherwise we'll have lovely corn stalks....with no corn. What looks like paper on the ground was an attempt at "phonebook mulching" to keep the weeds at bay. But look at that Carrot Forrest (bottom middle) and those dashingly handsome onion plants (bottom right)!

Here is Zach with the first harvested head of lettuce! We have more lettuce now than we know what to do with...

Salad made with our homegrown leaves :)

There are many enemies to the garden.... We found this monster slug on our porch one night. But it was so gloriously monsterous we didn't have the heart to kill it. So we walked it down the street and put it in someone's empty lot of grass.

My favorite thing so far has been our strawberries! They were absolutely delicious!!!!!

Before these I had only ever had the big, steroid induced, hyper-bred grocery store strawberries....and I thought they were good. But then I had these little organic, natural-size, home grown strawberries. SOOO much flavor was packed into these little guys!

This strawberry made me laugh....I think he was trying to become a tomatoe.

Below are some of the real tomatoes :)

Golly, isn't he a doll?

However, let's return to something that is NOT a doll. In fact, he is the scorn of all mankind, he is the scum of my garden, he is the DESTROYER of my petunias! This, my friends, is a cutworm (one of the many that plague me)

Here are my petunias before they were discovered by mister cutworm and friends....

....and here they are AFTER that little fatties feasting. At the time I had no idea what was eating my flowers. I started hunting around the box, and to my surprise (and disgust) found that little chunker hiding just below the dirt, waiting for the night to come out and gorge himself once more. I soon discovered several more and-- [don't read this if you somehow love cutworms]--squashed them all!!!