What I've learned from gardening...

This year I tried my hand at gardening and here are some of the things I've learned:

1. Planting a garden is easy: just throw some seeds in the ground and voila, you have a 'garden'.

2. Tending a garden is much harder and time consuming than I imagined -- I'm not of the extra patient-type, so to go out there and weed doesn't appeal to me. I think I've weeded twice this year -- both of those times were when my mom was visiting and I saw her out there weeding, so I felt guilty and joined her!

3. The mosquitoes around here are deadly! In order to weed my garden, I needed to douse myself in bug spray in order to stay alive out there -- and that only usually lasted about 10 minutes before the bugs started biting through the layer of bug spray.

4. The wild berries (photo above) were actually the easiest to tend to -- I did nothing -- there were wild out in the over growth in our back yard and my mom and dad found them and told me of their great wonder -- we picked twice -- once when my parent's where here and once on our own. The rest of them went to the birds!

5. Cucumbers are really easy to grow -- they are kind of wild -- growing vines everywhere, but you have to pick them at the right time, otherwise they start going to seed....more for next year, I guess.

6. You need more than 3 stalks of corn in order to reap a 'harvest'.

7. Tomatoes are also pretty easy to grow, except you have to give them a cage to climb up and I'm still not sure we'll get any this summer/fall -- I'm still waiting for them to turn orange/red.

8. You also need more than a 9 foot x 5 foot area in order to have a garden. I planted about 6 different things, but are only going to be able to gather cucumbers and tomatoes -- the rest either got eaten by the animals or were over powered by the vine-type vegetables.

Lessons for next year -- plant a bigger garden with the veggies spaced further apart and invest is some really good mosquito spray!