Here's to Hoping

I have planted a garden.

This from the girl who, after I stopped getting paid five cents a bag to pick the "little yellow flowers" growing in my parents' backyard, despised just about everything garden related. I can pin it down to a few reasons. I think I was always on weed duty. No one wants to pick weeds. I also know that the dinner menu at the Hickey house from the day the first lettuce is ripe (Does lettuce get ripe? See. I'm a newbie.) to the day the last squash is picked (usually the size of a human arm because it somehow got lost under the leaves for 3 days too long) is salad. That was a long sentence, but the point is the fat child in me doesn't like the memory of constant salad consumption. I'm pretty certain I always got the one bug that didn't rinse away, too.

Those reasons, to me, are enough to be understandably put off by gardening. But, then I had a baby. And then I bought a house. Something about having a baby and having a house ignited the necessity for a garden. Must have plants to eat.

Last August when my Mom "The Green Thumb" came to visit, we went on a special outing to get plants. She chose hardy plants that would be the most likely to survive (aka I might have to try to kill them) and some herbs. Easy enough? Well, today, I can tell you that all of those plants are dead. Everything except for a little pine tree that I planted 4 years ago. Although, Ramon was happy to point out to me that it's probably still alive because (exact words translated) "they live even if you don't water them in six months." Ouch.

When we decided that the grass in our back patch needed to be changed, I excitedly suggested that we make a place for the garden. He looked at me, looked at the planters either empty or home to a dead plant, and looked back at me. "We" decided that the whole back patch would be grass for now. Oh yeah, I call it a back patch because I don't think it can quite be classified as a yard if it only takes about 3 steps to get from one end to the other.

I may not have a place in the patch for the garden, but I do have 6 plastic planters of various sizes. Having something other than dead plants in them was motivation enough for me to try again. That and a packet of seeds costs like a buck. We went to home depot (hard h sound from the back of the throat and please pronounce the t at the end) and AV chose peas, Ramon chose cherry tomatoes, and I chose radishes, carrots, parsley and basil.

I have no idea if I planted them correctly because the packet told me how to plant them by using centimeters of depth and distance apart from each plant and centimeters still are pretty much gibberish and not a real measurement in my book.

The good news is I remembered to water them today. The other good news is that I have them in the front so I have to walk by them at least twice a day which is conducive to watering, as well. The other other good news is that we got water finally over the weekend, so there's actually water with which to water them.

I planted approximately one dollar worth of seeds. If I get at least one dollar worth of vegetables out of the project, I'll call that a rousing success.

Here's to hoping.