Look what I did!

Growing up, we always had a garden. A large garden! Dad always planted way too much that fed us, my grandparents and pretty much my entire church.

I remember every Sunday and Wednesday, we would pick whatever was ripe and tote multiple 5 gallon buckets to church where we would barely get out of the car before we became a mobile farmers market.

Since moving into our home a few years ago, I've wanted to grow a garden. So that's what I did!

I wanted something that could be easily maintained. Thus, the birth of a raised garden bed. DH constructed a bed about 7 feet by 3 feet out of some spare building materials from our porch.

We waited until the frost warning was over for our area, even though Mother Nature doesn't follow NOAA weather predictions. She frosted our area the night before we planted and then the temp rose to 80 degrees. Mother Nature is fickle.

We got $25 worth of top soil from a local rock, gravel and dirt business, which saved us about $75 if we had just bought planting mix or garden soil in bags. Sure, the bagged variety probably has a lot more nutrients and official sounding plant growing doohickeys but I figured that we planted a garden every year in top soil. We never fertilized it with anything but cow manure and we had tomatoes the size of your face. Just for the sake of having richer soil, I mixed in two bags of potting soil/garden soil and manure with the soil and voila ... a raised bed ready for plants.

This year is basically a trial run to see what works and what doesn't. I'm starting small with three tomato plants, big boy better boy and yellow and pink stripeys. Yellow squash and zucchini were started by seed on the opposite end to give them plenty of spreading room and a mound of 4 cucumber plants are in the center. I will train them to run up a trellis to keep their vines from taking over the whole container.

Just for funsies, I bought 8 tumbling toms tomato plants that I put in two hanging baskets for little tiny bite size 'maters.

Before you ask, yes I do say 'maters and 'taters in real life. I'm from the south. It's the law.

I'm adding in some cell phone pics of the progress and one extra yummy pic just for JMacky of my first strawberry breakfast this morning ... a Nutella and strawberry quesadilla, minus the cheese chicken but plus Nutella and berries.