Sarah and I have been busy this year with our vegetable garden. We tilled up (by hand) a 4×12 section of soil in the sunniest part of our backyard. Then, we added compost and some organic soil conditioner. Finally, we bought several seedlings and a few seeds at Lowes. Our organic gardening days had begun, and I quickly became obsessed.

Every day I patrol the garden looking for any signs of distress or weeds. For the disease and pests, there’s not really much I know how to do. I don’t want to use any chemicals, so I just grab the bugs and drown them. As for the weeds, we just try to mulch them to death with straw. It works fairly well, but I’m still pulling a few every day.

Just yesterday we got our first return. I harvested 2 very good looking cucumbers and 2 slightly mis-shapen cowhorn peppers. I’m really excited because the tomato plants have tiny little tomatoes all over them, and it’s just a matter of time before they ripen up.


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Here’s the full garden. We have (from left to right…sort of): 2 cucumber vines, 1 watermellon vine, 4 zuchinni, 8 varieties of peppers, 2 cilantro and 2 basil, and 5 varieties of tomatoes.


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Here’s a few of our tomatoes. They should be turning red any day now…


Look closely in the center!

Here’s my pride and joy, a little sugar-baby watermellon. I’ve been watching it very closely over the past few weeks. In the past week it’s grown from the size of a golf ball to the size of a girl’s softball. I’m not sure how big they’re supposed to get, but I think it’s around 5 lbs. I just hope it gets enough water.