Spillin' over

When Sustainable Springfield turned an empty lot in our neighborhood into a community garden, we couldn't wait to sign up for our own plot! Unfortunately, we had to wait a whole year before our dream came true but since January 2011 we've been happily gardening and planting veggies and fruit in our own little plot piece of Springfield.

[Little Man prouldy presenting our sugar snap peas in early April]

[Our raised bed at the community garden in early spring]


So far we've planted sugar snap peas, strawberries, different kinds of lettuce, arugula, bush beans, cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, swiss chard, scallions, tomatoes, basil, parsley, peppers and cantaloupe. Some of these we have been enjoying on a more or regular basis. our sugar snap peas were especially prolific but often our harvest didn't make it home for cooking. We simply snacked on them raw, picked off the vine right then and there!

Over the last two weeks our plants have really taken off and our plot started to resemble a jungle rather than a kitchen garden. Since our butterfly garden kit still hadn't shipped yet, I decided to thin out the plot and re-plant some of our veggies at the Duckling house. If it worked - great! If not, well at least we'd be preparing the planting area for its future design. Right?

Sunday, Little Man and I started weeding. What kind of looks like a ratty lawn is really just a collection of assorted short weeds ... oh, and fire ants which we've been battling with a poisonous bait. They are evil and their bites can even leave scars (True story! I have the scar to prove it!). Luckily (for us), they seem to like the bait just fine as shown by their eagerness to drag the little oatmeal colored crumbs into the mound and the silence that follows after just a day. No more fire ants, thank you very much!

[Before: The weedy mess we're dealing with]

After weeding for several hours and catching this year's first sunburn, fertilizing, planting and mulching we ended up with this:

[Always a bag short of a fully mulched bed ... ]

At least it's clean. Now it's wait and see if the veggies we replanted will catch on and thrive in their new place. Wish us luck!