LIFE LIST UPDATE – No. 389: Plant a vegetable garden

I scratched another item off my “life list” recently when I planted a vegetable garden for the first time.

On and off as a kid, I’d helped my grandparents with their gardens, but my parents never planted one, and I couldn’t honestly say that I’d ever planted one myself. That changed a week or so ago when my wife and teamed up to plant a small vegetable garden in our back yard.

Before I get into the meat of this thing, and in my defense, I have to say that I’m not a complete novice when it comes to gardening. It’s hard to grow up in Southwest Alabama without picking up some knowledge of how gardens work. Also, I took Ag in high school and occassionally read about gardening.

With that said, the first task in our recent vegetable garden project was to select a plot for our garden. We knew that we only planned to plant a few vegetables and that we wouldn’t need much room. We eventually picked a patch of dirt about 15 feet by 20 feet adjacent to our backyard shed and close to a water spigot.

Next, we borrowed my father-in-law’s gas-powered tiller and began breaking up the ground. This took a couple of days as we took the time to let the ground dry out from recent rains and picked out all of the lose grass and weeds. Our house sits on an old peanut field, so the ground wasn’t packed hard and tilling it wasn’t difficult once I got the hang of using the tiller.

Once the ground was prepared, we laid out our rows. We only needed three because we only planned to plant a few tomatoes, squash plants and cucumbers. My mother-in-law provided the plants, and the kids helped me and my wife set them out. That took an hour or so, and we then gave them a liberal dose of water from the nearby garden hose.

Between the tomato plants, my wife planted a few dandelions with the idea that these flowers will attract insects, which keeps them away from the tomato plants. I’d never heard of doing this before, but being no expert on the subject I kept my mouth shut. So far so good because as far as I can tell, the tomatoes are insect free up to this point.

A few days ago, my mother-in-law also donated some wire tomato cages and fertilizer to our project. I don’t have the fertilizer container in front of me, so the exact name of the product escapes me at the moment. According to the directions, you just apply a few balls of the fertilizer to the plants every few days, and the fertilizer absorbs into the ground, nurturing the plants.

Only time will tell as to how our first foray into vegetable gardening will turn out, but if we have any success it’ll mostly be due to the efforts of my wife and in-laws. In the end, how many of you have ever planted a vegetable garden? How many of you have a garden at home now? How big is your garden? What do you have planted in it? Let us know in the comments section below.