Biting off what we can chew

I am a bit impetuous. When I decide that I want to do something I want to do it all the way and I want to do it right now. Because of this I often get into new projects way over my head. Such was the case last year when I decided that I wanted to start gardening. Some friends of ours had been renting a plot at the Mayor's garden (a communal garden owned by Indy Parks) and enjoyed it, so I thought I would give it a try too.

I don't remember the official plot size of our garden last year, but I quickly realized that I was in over my head...again. By mid-summer our plants that had acutally grown were dwarfed by weeds and barely producing fruit. I let nature take its course and chalked it up to experience.

I wasn't about to give up though. This year I decided that we would create a small garden at home that would not overwhelm me (hopefully).

Here is a photo of our tiny garden. It was 2' x 3', which seemed almost pointless, but it was a much better experience for us than last year. And, as was last year, it was a great learning experience.



One fun thing that we grew in our garden this year was cotton. The owner of the garden shop where we bought our plants (that was one thing we learned - it is so much easier to plant plants than grow plants from seed) gave the kids a cotton plant - just for fun. This is a picture of one of the pods before it opened. I have to admit, I kept expecting it to say "feed me, Seymour", but it didn't. Eventually the pods did open, though, and we had cotton. I was going to take a picture of the cotton, but I never did and eventually got tired of it sitting around the house and threw it away. But it was kind of cool to see how cotton grows.



This last picture is of some mums that I planted last year. They bloomed so beautifully this year that I actually would walk out to the sunroom and look out the back door for no other reason than to see my gorgeous mums. They made me happy.