Gardening!

Nathan and I started a garden a few months ago. Neither of us have any idea what we're doing, despite the fact that I'm an intern at Seattle Tilth (which has been so much fun, and a great learning resource). Our fantastic yard at our house came with two raised beds and a few pots. We enhanced the dirt with chicken manure and got some seeds from Uprising Seeds and Seeds of Change.

A few months ago, we started by sketching out our gardening space and planning out where we wanted to plant different things. Keep in mind that neither of us have any experience with gardening at all. We planted carrots a centimeter apart, onion starts an inch apart, and lettuce in tiny little rows. The chard sprouts were nearly decimated by a slug infestation and we spent hours mulling over slug trapping solutions. I carefully tended plant starts indoors, including a dozen wee tomatillo plants, only to kill them all when I transplanted them to larger pots. (We've since purchased tomatillo and tomato starts and gave up on growing them from seed.)

But now! Success! Our funny little first-timer garden is taking off, and we could eat giant salads 3 times a day since we have lettuce bursting forth in crazy quantities. (Annie's mom asked me to bring a salad to her graduation party last Saturday: thank goodness because I wasn't sure how to use all our lettuce!)

We harvested our first leaves of chard a few days ago and sauteed them with garlic and lemon- they were delicious! We're eating salads pretty much every night (anyone need some lettuce?), and our tiny little carrots are growing away. I'm still nurturing a couple dozen basil plants indoors (pesto!), and our tomatoes, zuchinni, cucumber and kale are starting to take off.

It's really exciting. I feel like a little kid every time I go wander around the garden and see what's poking up. Even though I took tons of biology and botany courses at UW, it's still kind of crazy magical to me that it actually works to poke a seed in the dirt and have something sprout up and then EAT IT!