Overdue Garden Update

It's been a long time since I wrote about my garden. A lot has (and hasn't) happened with it.

Having a baby sure does have a way of putting other things on the back burner...

My zucchini plants started growing well, and then died. 

The bean seeds barely sprouted, then died.

3 out of 5 sunflowers sprouted and survived. 

The only herb that sprouted was the sage. 

I finally planted everything in my raised bed garden about three weeks later than I should have. 

My yellow squash made it just fine. 

The tomatoes are surviving wonderfully. 

My father-in-law was out doing yard work and stepped on one of my sunflowers, which stunted it and now it's stopped growing while the other two are fine. It looks like we're down to 2 out of 5 sunflowers.

I had to start over with the beans and zucchini. 

Only one of the two more zucchini seeds that I planted survived, and it has completely caught up with the other squash plants. You'd almost never know that I planted it weeks later than the others.

The beans sprouted really quickly, but within a couple of days something had eaten nearly all of the leaves off of every little stalk. I planted some more seeds and investigated the problem. Some creatures live down inside the cinder blocks that make up the walls of the raised bed. I've seen lizards in there, but lizards wouldn't eat those plants. Then I saw a big snail inside one block... And another... And another... And a couple of slugs....

I learned how to hate snails and slugs from my Grandpa. When we would visit him and my Grandma in Utah during my childhood, I would inevitably end up out in the dirt helping him tend to his plants and trees. The snails there were terrible. He would hand me a container of salt and I'd follow him out early in the morning and pour a little bit of salt on every slug or snail I would find. It would make them bubble and dissolve, which, as gross as it sounds, was very effective in getting rid of them. So after discovering those slimy critters lurking around my garden, I took a canister of salt and poured some on every snail and slug I could find, and then I poured a line of salt around one edge of the cinder block walls. Take that! Just try getting into my garden now and see what happens.

Miracle of miracles--one little stalk had no leaves on it (dumb snails), but it was still green, so I kept watering it along with planting a few more seeds (yet again). Every day it just stayed the same, looking sad, leafless, and small. However, on Friday when I went out to water the garden it had a tiny little cluster of leaves on it!

It made me so happy!!

My beans are thriving now that I've replanted them 3 times. 

The lettuce patch had the same problem as the beans. All of the tiny little leaves were eaten completely off. Oh, it was infuriating! But I continued watering it, and it made a beautiful comeback.

So now my garden is doing well, after enclosing it in chicken wire and lining the cinder blocks with salt and replanting seeds up to three times.