Adding to the Family

I received three pepper plants the other day. Max helped me dig up some more sod. Haha, now he knows my pain! Now my garden is about 3x5 or so. We planted the pepper plants and placed some cages around the tomato plants. Also, I didn't notice this at the time but one of my tomato plants was actually 3 in a cluster. I separated them and now I have 5 tomato plants and 3 pepper plants.

Also, just for fun I threw some lettuce seeds in the dirt before the pepper plants came around and I have 2 little seedlings now! How cool?!

It's been raining so much lately, I haven't had to water them. I hope they are getting enough!

On a side note, the peonies have not bloomed again even though there are little buds. I guess it takes awhile? The little pink roses are adorable but I wish I had a big bush of deep red roses too. The orange lilies are hardy and a neighboring bush is getting ready to bloom. These near-blooming lilies look like they might be a different color. We'll see. I'm hoping all these bloom soon so that they can be admired at the Housewarming Party this weekend.

New Beginnings

Now that Max and I have moved into our first house, I am excited to begin a real garden. I have a decent sized area that gets tons of sun in my backyard behind the garage. Yesterday I got 3 tomato plants and I was really anxious to get them in the ground.

Yeah, that was a lot of work! I bought a spade/shovel thing and hacked my lawn away to yield a 3x4 foot square. Sod is not easy to tear up! (Also, I just wanted to say that I picked out the earthworms and put them back in the ground). I have no idea if that's large enough for the 3 tomatoes. I guess we'll see. I raked the plot and patted it down. Then I roughly divided the area into sixths. I thought I would put the tomatoes in a checkerboard pattern. Then I transplanted the 3 baby plants into the ground and watered them. That was the fun part.

I was sweating profusely and very very dirty... hehe :D I had used a ton of bug spray on myself because the mosquitoes are insane back there. Then I showered. Sigh.

Max's brother has a tiller. I may be expanding this garden to a 4x8 foot garden this weekend. Who knows!

Any suggestions of what to do with this leftover sod? Can I somehow compost it?