Growing garden

Growing a garden has been really fullfilling. It is amazing to see something grow from a tiny seed to a towering plant or a delicious vegtable. God's creations really are amazing. Here are some before and after pictures to see how much everything has grown. The before set were taken on April 27th, so about a month and half after the garden had been planted. The after or present pictures were just taken on June 4th.

Here is the first garden box containing: Swiss Chard(front of picture), two tomato plants(one cherry, one large) and a pepper plant(He is hiding behind the tomato plant on the left side of the picture).

Here's the after. Everything got so big! I knew tomato plants could get out of control but I definitely wasn't expecting this. And strangely the cherry tomato plant got almost twice as big as the regular tomato plant.
Here is the pepper plant. So far we have two peppers growing(not pictured) that I can find. Sometimes they hide and all the sudden I notice it one day and it's huge. So who knows, there might be more.

Cherry tomatoes: some are almost ripe enough to pick. I am planning on making homemade spaghetti sauce as soon as I pick some of those babies!

And the swiss chard. I love the way this looks and it definitely produces A LOT, but I probably won't plant it again because I just don't use it enough. But it really got a lot bigger than I thought it would.

It's monsterous!

Here is the second garden box. From left to right or bottom of pic to top of pic it contains: Peas, Spinach, Carrots and Onions.

I have already picked a few onions. I think they might be pearl onions because they are still pretty small but were almost on top of the surface and looked ready to pick. And maybe this is just me, but the top of the onion, the green part that grows above ground are green onions. I had no clue that is how green onions grew. Did you know that? But they are sooo delicious. I love onions!

The peas are one of the prettiest plants to me. They grew so nice and uniform up the "ladders" we created for them. I just picked some peas last night and they are so sweet straight from the pod. Chad will most likely eat most of the ones I picked before I can cook with them but that's ok.

The spinach really produced a lot too...maybe all lettuce does? I already have used a lot of the spinach as well. It's so fullfilling to cook with the ingredients that you have grown yourself.

Lastly, the Watermelon and strawberrie we planted in a little section of dirt my mom had that was empty. These were the only two things we grew out of the boxes we made.

The watermelon vines of course are growing out of control, but that's normal. As you can see in the picture above we started with about 6 seperate plants and now we have taken 4 out and there are only 2 left but still plenty of vines.

The strawberries didnt' do as good as I hoped they would. About a third of the plants died before they even started producing. I think that was due to an ant infestation. And the ones that have produced tend to give really small strawberries and they aren't very sweet even when they are really ripe. And sadly it looks like more plants are dying too. I am not sure what the cause is but oh well. I have had such good luck other than those. And it has still been fun to see them grow even if the outcome wasn't exactly what I wanted.

I am so proud of my garden! And I really love taking care of it. I am afraid that sometimes it has been neglected but it's still going strong. I should especially thank my mom because she has helped out a lot as well. She waters for me sometimes and also does a lot of weeding. So thanks mom!

And really I recommend you plant a garden! Even a small one is fun to watch grow.