Garden

Erik and I have been married for 7 years (yesterday was our Anniversary!) and in those seven years I have tried to garden many times. I have succeeded a few times and I felt like I was missing something the year or two that I didn't plant a garden. But I've not gotten my garden in before the 1st of June, ever.

So that was my goal this year. I even started seeds indoors for the first time. Alas, none of those starts survived and what with the rain and all I only got part of my garden in before the self-imposed deadline.

Well, I got most of my garden in before the deadline but the slugs have been horrible this year. They ate 5 sugar baby watermelon starts, 4 lemon cucumber starts, 3 pepper plants, 2 regular cucumber plants and a partridge in a pear tree.

Okay, maybe they didn't eat the last one but I'm sure if I had a pear tree they would have tried.

Not really desiring to go buy slug bait, I thought I'd try a few different ways of killing slugs. I tried baby food jars filled with beer. I set 21 baby jars down in the dirt a little way and filled them with cheap beer and in a little under a week I drowned over 400 slugs! But then I ran out of beer (it's not something we normally have around the house) and the rain diluted the rest. So lately I've been slug hunting in the mornings with a salt shaker.

But I'm sure you didn't stop by to hear about slugs.

Here is this year's garden. This year I set 2x4 frames down into the ground and then spread newspaper and straw between all the beds. This way I don't have to weed the entire garden area. I'm thrilled with how it turned out and I'm excited for things to start growing.
Consider these the before pictures:

This is the bean trellis in the foreground:

Here are my tomato plants, I went with all small/ cherry tomato type plants this year in hopes that more will ripen on the vine:


Looking back at the pea and bean trellises, the peas are starting to climb:


This is my potato box. It's my first attempt at growing potatoes in straw, or at all, for that matter:
And just behind the potato box there are pepper plants in the tires. The slugs haven't touched these pepper plants yet and I'm really hoping they won't.

Oh grow garden, grow!