Secret Garden is a Lie

Gardening is hard. 

I used to watch "The Secret Garden" when I was a little girl, and it seemed so easy! Step one: Take a run-down, dilapidated old garden and dream up how pretty it could be. Step two: dig a couple holes here, pull a few weeds there, spread some seeds, and BOOM! Beautiful garden in two simple steps.

Obviously I knew this was just a movie, but I think deep down I still thought that building a little garden would be easy; take two or three hours maybe...

I was wrong. 

I didn't think about how hard getting grass out of the ground is. I didn't think about how tilling soil hurts all your muscles. And I definitely didn't think about all the mean flies that bite! 

I also didn't think about how my no-till-farming-husband killed the weeds and grass and basically the soil in the very spot I chose to plant my tomatoes... (he felt so bad about it that he bought me more and planted them in a different location. What a guy!)

All that to say, it is truly wonderful to see little sprouts peeping through the soil after all that hard work. We haven't even harvested anything yet and I'm in wonder over my little rows of corn and potatoes growing bigger everyday. 

Basically here's a warning for anyone thinking to start a garden. It will take you days just to get to the planting stage of things, and then you have to baby the ground with fertilizer and making sure the soil is moist enough, and THEN there are these things called weeds (thanks a lot Adam and Eve!). It's so unfortunate that creating nice ground for plants also means creating nice ground for weeds. ALSO, the entire time you are planting, or pulling weeds, or what-have-you, you will probably get eaten by mosquitos or flies or ants. 

BUT it seems to be worth it! I think... so far. We'll see if this whole gardening kick continues into next year. 

Here's one of my cute potato plants and some rows of corn. Also here are some flowers Marc's Papa planted and cared for and they are still beautiful and I'm thankful we have them.