Our new home has no garden (as mentioned) and very little landscaping. I’m excited!

Ty has a place close to the house in mind. He likes those raised planters with corrugated metal along the sides. I’m still undecided… but I have all winter to plan. (And those dreams will help me get through the gray winter.)

The boys will be inspired gardening in a new place, I think. At times, I’ve wondered if this is a little forced for them. (Especially when Jude complains about the weeding…) And then Jude finds something so cool that he squeals and calls his brothers over, like this caterpillar with its eggs all over its body. Or the boys have a blast throwing veggies at each other.

But mostly, my mind returns to when we came home from our vacation this summer, and how much we enjoyed exploring our gardens, as a whole family. The growing was amazing, and we picked for about an hour. 

And the way Morris loved to pick anything when his dad was around.

I think we’ll give it another go in 2019.

Our new home has no garden, but it did come with a surprise: Pumpkins! While scoping out the property and walking our fence-line I noticed those unmistakable, very large leaves and thick vines creeping through all the weeds. When we moved closer we saw orange! We’ve spotted at least 5 pumpkins growing, but there may be more buried underneath a bunch of stuff I’m not brave enough to go into without my boots and gloves. Each member of our family will get one for Halloween! What a nice surprise.

We made a brief visit to our community garden last week. It had been at least three weeks since we’d last visited due to packing our house every free moment we had.

I was secretly hoping for a last hurrah of tomatoes and green beans, but nothing but a few cherry tomatoes remained. So, we pulled out the plants…

It was not a very bountiful garden, but we produced about four or five pounds of cucumbers and three or four pounds of tomatoes for donation. Most of it went to the community food pantry, Caring Hands.

Others in the community garden struggled, too. When I talked with a few who visited for watering, they couldn’t get over the weeds and the wet at the beginning of the season. The extreme dry all through July made it a struggling crop for them, too. A lot of tomato plants just looked sad this year. The cucumbers did pretty good though, and I think back to our awesome zucchini plant that produced the three pounder and several other large ones. We liked that!