How Our Garden Grew

How our first garden grew is a lesson in mistakes. Very little went as planned. You can read about how completely not planned it was in our original post about gardening with kids. Because gardening with kids is a whole other story.

​Let's take a look at what we got...

Pinto Beans

We planted what we thought were green bean seeds.

Nope.

We ended up with a beautiful plant full of...

PINTO BEANS!

At least the preschooler had fun picking them and emptying the seed pods.

Weeds

Oh the weeds! Over half of our plants ended up being weeds.

We put orange sweet pepper seeds into the cups. Instead of orange sweet peppers we got a bunch of 5 foot tall weeds.

My friend, Marla, tells me they are generically known as red root here because they are red at the start of the root.

Peas

We did successfully plant and grow peas. They simply died into a shriveled brown vine before we picked the first pod. Come to think of it, there may have only been one pod.

Basil

The basil we planted has done very well. I've begun pulling the leaves and drying them. Then my eldest took a pair of scissors to them. Ah, well. This is probably a better container plant than a garden plant.

Tomatoes

We were successful at growing tomatoes. Our eldest was always excited to go out and check them for new tomatoes that were red enough to be picked. That enthusiasm waned by the end of the season. We still have to remove quite a few green tomatoes.

Sunflowers

The sunflowers grew tall and pretty. But no sunflower seeds. The stalks were not strong enough to hold the heads once the seeds formed and they all snapped in a storm.

Watermelon

We planted this one and the vine grew all over. We saw several watermelons growing but none made it to be picked. The squirrels got every one of them.

So many, many failures...

A lot of failures in our first garden. We still had a lot of fun. We will definitely be growing another garden next summer.

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Imperfect Mommy is a series of posts about life and parenthood. If you'd like to read more, select the Imperfect Mommy category in the sidebar. If you enjoy this, or any of the posts, please leave me a comment below.