Green Acres Is The Place To Be

Andrew and I are becoming quite the domestic homemakers. Needless to say, we've been spending the past couple of weeks at Lowes (on top of the countless trips that Andrew had already been making). But this was the first time we headed into the Garden section. Here's a shot of one our shopping carts below. That's right ONE of our shopping carts. We ended up needing two to haul all the plants that we had picked out.

Arriving home, while Andrew was puttering in the yard, I had all our new plants lined up on the ledge ready to go:

The little section we had selected for the plants was occupied by a large bushy thing with purple flowers. It had a certain charm (despite all the bees crawling all over it) but we decided it had to go:

We believe that big plant was sage based on the shape and smell of the leaves (plus a marker we found buried in the dirt), so I picked a few leaves and froze them before we uprooted the bush.

In its place, lots of young seedlings waiting to grow us tons of yummy things to eat (that's how I like to picture it).  I got a little carried away in the aisles of Lowe's and ended up picking strawberry and blackberry plants, and what I believed to be a fig bush. When we got home and actually read up on figs, we realized it was actually a tree that can grow up to ten feet tall and wide. Whoops!

Andrew did a great job of uprooting the unruly sage plant and tilling the dirt with our handy dandy garden claw:

With a lot of digging and potting soil, I transferred all the plants to their new home. There isn't much open space in our backyard that isn't devoted to Andrew's grass growing project or paved, but I like the fact that I can see how far my plants have progressed during the day when I come home from work each day.  Joining the plants I mentioned above, I also added a few varieties of tomatoes, one red pepper plant, one yellow pepper plant and one cucumber plant. I also sprinkled some wildflower and carrot seeds that we had received free with Andrew's grapevine purchase in some open patches:

That's our new garden upfront, with Andrew's grapevines around the corner to the right, and our deck overlooking it all:

A week later, it's amazing to see the plants' progress already. They look healthier, taller and have multiple new leaves. As I keep telling everyone, I will be thrilled even if only one of these plants bears something edible this summer.