I stopped weeding my garden.

The grass had a stronger will than I did. And we won’t be here for much more than a few weeks, so what’s the point, right? The plants are big enough to take care of themselves! Or so I tell myself.

Also, the peas fell over into the lettuce. Next time I will use a taller fence for them to climb. Yes, there will be a next time. I’m not scared of gardening. I just have to figure out how to keep the grass out.

So it’s a mess.

But look, flowers!

It’s been raining pretty much every day this week, so I haven’t done anything with the garden in a long while, until today. It was getting pretty ugly. I don’t mind weeding, but it’s the “grassing” I don’t like. This garden has a lot of grass which has long, stubborn roots. In most cases, I end up just ripping the top off. At least it looks better for a couple days. In the picture below you can see a good chunk of it between the lettuce and pea rows. Tim and I were out there weeding together for 40 minutes and we didn’t finish.

I’m excited that the lettuce is almost big enough that I can take some for a salad without leaving an obvious hole. I think the pea buds are almost coming. I’m interested to see what they taste like because I accidentally grabbed the wrong pack. You can barely see the carrots, but there are a few there! They are quite sparse though. Don’t know how many more will pop up. Based on this experience alone, I probably wouldn’t do the seed strips again. And how much taller can those onions get? How do you know when they are big enough to pick?

I’m glad I kept it fairly small and simple for my first time planting, and am happy with the results so far.

So, it seems like we have gone from winter to summer in a matter of 2 weeks! I am glad the cold and snow is gone, but I just wish the mild temperatures would stick around a bit more.

However, the warm temperature means I can do stuff outside! To be honest, I’m not the kind of person who lives outside and I have never done much yard work or anything like that. The life of a renter, hey? But when I came here in the fall and discovered that our backyard had a garden, I got excited to try to see how green my thumb could be.

I took this back in October. Not so pretty.

So this weekend when Tim’s parents were here, we made a little trip to pick up a few tools and seeds. I thought I would tackle this mess during the week, but Sunday evening we were all sitting around in the backyard, digesting our BBQ, and Tim’s mom and sister decided to start digging up a bit of the weeds and things. I think we all thought not much would get done, but they didn’t want to stop! After just an hour, it looked like this:

Way more attractive.

I was happy to see how easy it was, and now am not afraid to do more in the future. I find it hard to push myself to do new things, so it helps to have help.

Thanks guys!

Tim’s mom exclaimed so many times while digging about how nice the soil was. I think it affected my dreams that night; I dreamed that the next morning things were already sprouting. Sadly that was not the case.

As for what I planted, I didn’t want to go overboard. I just got some peas, carrots, and lettuce. But we also planted a row of onions that apparently were never harvested last time somebody gardened here. I never ever buy onions, so discovering them didn’t make a difference to me, and they are up for grabs when they are ready! That tiny little green blob in the top right corner is rhubarb that was there already, and there is clematis on the trellis on the left. I hope to also get some tomato plants when I return from a BC trip at the end of the month.

If this works out, next year I think I will definitely try a few different things, and think about it a bit earlier so I can start some seeds inside earlier.

Do you have a garden? What have you planted this year?

(And if you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out what Calvin was up to while we were working.)