Gardens

Last Saturday we had a gardening enrichment activity. My stake president is a Master Gardener (really, he took a class in order to earn the title) so he showed us his garden and taught us a little about gardening. I think I am catching on to my mom and sister's passion for gardening. The food you grow honestly does taste better than the produce you get at the store and its cheaper. :) I have also found it to be a lot of fun to take care of. I can't have pets at my house so I have a garden instead. It honestly takes the same amount of care and love to keep alive that a pet would. It just doesn't run around and give you love back (which I guess are the reasons ppl have pets)

It was really great to see the different types of gardens that were in my stake president's neighborhood. They were all so beautiful too. I guess it did make me a little depressed that my garden didn't look as great as theirs did, but oh well. I'm just a beginner so I can't expect too much from myself.

These are Pres. Baker's tomatoes. They are so big! I was so proud of my tomatoes because they are the biggest and strongest of all my plants and they even have flowers already, but after seeing his I lost faith in my garden. Oops, I'm complaining and being depressed again. I need to be more optimistic. Let's try that again: Even though my tomatoes aren't as big as his, I am still proud of myself cuz they are doing very well.

This is Pres. Baker's garden. It's called a box garden (it's a bunch of big boxes) This is also the type of garden that my mom does. If I had a bigger yard this would be the kind of garden that I would do.

This kind of garden is called Square-Foot Gardening. This is the kind of garden that I have, although mine is not nearly as big as Pres. Baker's neighbor's. This kind of gardening is definitely prettier for landscaping purposes but I don't think it's the best for growing lots of big plants. With this kind of garden you choose a plant and put as many as will fit in a square foot. You can do more than one square foot of a certain plant. You don't have to stick to just one. I have a square-foot garden because it was the only kind that I could put in the parking lot in my backyard. My garden is in a little wooden box that my dad made that is 4-foot by 4-foot.

I have one major problem with my garden though: Peas. My mom and I scattered some pea seeds all over my garden so that they could grow in between all the plants. They grow faster than most everything else so we figured I would be harvesting my peas about the same time everything else was still growing. Our calculations were a little off in our timing and in the number of peas we planted. The peas grew fast but they are just now starting to flower so they won't be done for a little while longer. Plus, I have so many peas! They are everywhere. There are so many and they are so big that they have stunted the growth of nearly all my other plants. My lettuce and carrots have all been smashed flat by them and my eggplants and cucumbers get very little sunlight so they are still very, very tiny. A week ago I had reached my point of frustration with them. They hadn't started flowering and my mom and I weren't sure if they were going to because of the heat and they had killed one of my corns. I wanted to just rip them all out and go without peas this year. Right as I started ripping them out, I noticed a flower on one of them. Why now!?! So I resisted the urge to commit a massacre of all peas and now they are covered in flowers. Hopefully this means they will be done soon and will leave the rest of my garden alone.