Starting My Gardening Journey!

***please note that I wrote this post back in May but was only able to find my old pics recently. As such, I will be changing the date to May soon :D **

For as long as I can remember I have always wanted to have a 'green thumb' and grow my own food. For as long as I can remember I have always failed spectacularly at it.  Over the years I have watched/stalked friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who were able to successfully grow lovely plants and beautiful veggie crops with envy. "How are they doing it?" I would ponder. "what on earth am I doing wrong?" I'd ask. I faced lots of challenges such as trying to grow in dirt that was basically hard clay, and having basically no knowledge about feeding plants nutrients or how much to water. After a few failed attempts I gave up.

Fast forward to when we moved into our new home, and I decided to give this veggie growing thing another chance. It was the beginning of our first summer there and I was excited to give it another go. My family was skeptical. "Haven't you already tried this before?" "Why throw away all that money buying plants that wont grow when you can buy vegetables at the store?" "why put in all the effort?!" etc. etc.

I didn't let it deter me though. After all a gardener is technically the ultimate foodie - you are literally GROWING your own food! Cant get much Hipster than that! 😉 So I decided to go out and buy a few packets of seeds, a few baby seedlings, some pots and some dirt, and just see what would happen. Though we had a huge backyard, it was a total mess - overrun with tall grass and weeds - so I decided to start small and just plant in a few pots. To my surprise (and utter delight !) I was finally able to grow some edibles! :) I was really excited!! I managed to harvest a handful of zucchinis and cucumbers, 2 green peppers, some radishes, and a whole bunch of tomatoes!

A few pics of my mini harvest:

Now to any mildly experienced gardeners this would not seem at all impressive, but for me it was amazing! I had finally managed to grow something! Sure, my cucs and zuchs plants all died after a tiny harvest. I dealt with blossom end rot on some tomatoes (after I figured out what blossom end rot is) and only got like 2 bell peppers, but still. Progress.

(For a brief outline of the very many stupid mistakes I made....please see the below slideshow:)

Mistake # 1: I thought it would be a clever idea to try growing radishes in recycled egg cartons. I mean you only need a few inches for radishes right? Wrong. It was an utter failure. LOL Radishes dont need that much soil, but they still need at least a good 6 inches I would say!

another mistake: Seeing as we don't get good sunlight in our house for me to grow things indoors, I thought I would help them along with a nice little table lamp. This was not a good idea and proved to be useless! :P

This was my attempt to grow tomatoes. As you can see it was an utter failure! It was just a few stringy strings (or 'leggy' stems). What I should have done was a) add more soil b) have it filled up to the top so they could get more sunlight

I had planted like 5 cucumber seeds and this is all I got hahaha

Finally I decided to cheat...and purchased a few seedlings, but not giving up I decided to leave the seeds I had planted outside. Then one day it rained and everything drowned! :O

o_0

But alas eventually I was able to grow some tomato plants from seeds! :)

But this was my main tomato plant! It was a cherry tomato which I decided to plant in a huge planter to allow it to grow. And grow it did! I figured the pot was TOO big, but at the end of the season, when I emptied it, I found that the roots had been PACKED into there! :)

These were my zuchinnis. Any exprienced gardner is now cringing. Dont make my mistake in planting your zuchinni into a teeny tiny pot. These baby can grow to be more than a meter wide and high! Suffice to say this baby grew and gave me about 2-3 zuchinnis before dying after a lack of space :(

Back when I didnt know what these evil bugs were. Not only do they kill your plants, but they also have no manners and will get their freak on in the middle of your cucumber plants. Rude. 

A small tomato plant I had bought as a seedling and ended up killing with blossom end rot. No tomatoes from this plant :(

Beginning of a cucumber. Little did I know that I was overcrowding those babies and giving them way too little space. They died after I only got a few cucumbers :(

These are beans that grew in between those row of tomato plants I had planted (in early pic). Weirdest part? I DIDN'T PLANT ANY BEANS.....Nature you crazy.

Armed with the knowledge I had obtained and the determination of achieving a large harvest, I made plans for using our big backyard for some good use next year. Encouraged by all this I decided "next year- I go bigger and better!" And Guess what? Next year is here and I am fully deep into my gardening project! :)

So I thought I would share my journey with you! I will be sharing what I've tried, what works (and what doesn't work) and everything else I learn along the way! I will be sharing with you updates from my garden and how things are developing, and how we transformed a yard full of overgrown weeds into veggies! (I hope.) 

I'm really excited about this (I know ... excitement over a garden makes me a total grandma), and I hope you are too! (grandmas unite! :) )

So I'm really excited to take on this gardening challenge. Though I know NOTHING about all of this I am willing to learn. I hereby take on the challenge to learn how to garden once and for all! Whose with me? 😀