Hope Springs Eternal

I come from a family of gardeners.  I don’t mean that any of my relatives are professional gardeners or anything like that but everyone has a garden.  My grandparents had a large garden in their back yard when they were alive and my mother has always had a garden.  Both of my brothers put a lot of time in their gardens.  I do not seem to have inherited the green thumb.

When I was in my pre-teens, one of my best friends lived next door and I remember trying to put together a garden in his back yard.  It was hard work and all I really recall doing was throwing around a lot of dirt trying to hoe the soil to get it ready for planting.  Other than that, I am sure my friend Brian did all the work.  By the time we got around to planting and later weeding the garden, I had lost interest.

My mother grew lot of tomatoes.  If you have read some of my previous entries I have already gone into my feelings on tomatoes.  She also grew things like peas and green beans that I love fresh from the garden.  She has some luck with green peppers and usually includes onions in her garden.  One of my brothers grows tons of garlic and pretty much supplies the rest of the family with this goody.  His garden is raised beds and usually looks like something from Martha Stewart.

The one thing that everyone grows is zucchini.  If you have ever lived in an area where there was a lot of gardening going on, you know that zucchini can become so plentiful that every neighbor is trying to give it away.  Which was always fine by me because I love all the things that I can make with zucchini, such as zucchini bread and zucchini relish.  It practically grows like a weed.

So, when I lived on my own later in life and didn’t have neighbors with zucchini surplus, this was the thing I decided I could garden.  I once tried growing them in a large laundry style basket on the patio of my apartment.  The neighborhood cats decided that I had set them up their own private bathroom.  End of experiment one.  I have tried to grow them two years in a row where I currently live.  The first year, the seeds came up but the plants got eaten.  The second year, I put up some fence and the plants got to live a little fuller life.  They even had flowers that gave me hope that I might actually see a vegetable one day but for some reason they never materialized.

It’s early yet this year but I went out and turned the soil in my little garden area.  After looking for information on soil quality online, I have decided that my soil is sandy and perhaps can be helped with some added organic materials.  A couple of bags of manure will need to be bought at the local nursery type store and I will try one more attempt at planting in a few weeks when the weather gets a little warmer.  Hope truly does Spring eternal.