In my lovely garden

I almost didn't plant a garden this year.  But the economy made me do it.  And my Mom told me that even if my garden didn't work out very well, as in past years, I needed the practice.  So I sucked it up and spent the month of May getting it going.  In the past years, many of my plants have turned out kind of puny, so this year I decided to fertilize even though the author of Square Foot Gardening insists that by using his soil mix, fertilizing isn't necessary.  I'm hoping the fertilizer will make the difference I've been looking for.

So far, so good:

This year I planted an entire box of green beans and an entire box of corn.  My corn has never really gotten very far, and I'm told you need to plant a patch at least five feet square to get good cross-pollination.  Well, my boxes are only four feet square, but hopefully that will be good enough.

I lost a lot of my baby plants and brand new seedlings when it SNOWED(!) over Memorial Day weekend.  I replaced quite a few of them, but as you can see, the box above is half empty.

But look at my lettuce!  Seriously I'm so excited about this lettuce!  It's already much bigger than it ever got last summer.   And it tastes really, really good.  Last year's lettuce was all bitter, and alot was wasted because we just didn't like it.   I made salad last night with 3-4 different kinds of lettuce, and it was so delicious!  These are all organic and/or heirloom varieties.  I planted buttercrunch, Romaine, and some unknowns, leftover from last year's seed mix.  We are working feverishly now that lots of bugs and cateripillars have been seen invading this lettuce.  Luckily, killing garden pests if one of Dallin's favorite activities and the primary way he contributes to our garden each summer.

My corn will definitely been a foot high by the fourth of July.  It's grown quite a bit even since I took this picture a week ago.  In the back is the one garden I'm not sure of, our moon garden.  We have a wonderful book called Roots, Shoots,  Buckets, and Boots by Sharon Lovejoy.  It's got all kinds of fun theme gardens.  Dallin decided we should plant a moon garden, which has all plants that bloom or are at their best in the evenings.  But we should have started everything from seed back in March or April, and we didn't know that until it was too late, so we sowed everything into the ground in May... and honestly, it was the end of May.  So I don't know how this one will turn out.  Moonflowers are planted at the base of the tipi, and if they get big enough, they will grow up and the vines will wind all over the tipi.  The other flowers are planted in a crescent shape just in front of the tipi.