The Garden is Planted (and Growing)

 

You might recall where I had intended to put the garden.  You might also recall how that plan got interrupted, and how I began making plans to move the garden somewhere, but I didn't know where.  As it turned out, that somewhere is my parents' back yard, because that's where it turns out I am for most of the summer.  Don't you think it's a good idea for my garden and me to be in the same general location most of the time?

As you can see above, I had to first pack them for the looooong journey by car.  My husband and I repackaged most of them, giving them a little more room for their feet than they had in their little cut-off toilet paper rolls.  I saved the containers from the flowers I bought for my landscaping job, and had pots for most of them.  Then when our friends came over to help us pack the house, I kept giving random jobs like, "Could you please drill holes in the bottoms of these plastic peanut butter jars so I can take more tomato plants out west?"  The last few that stayed in their toilet paper tubes got nestled on top of a layer of potting soil, and off we went.  My husband, the plants, and I.

 

So the only issue any of us could see with the garden location was that it was frequented by wandering bunnies.  Cute bunnies.  Hungry bunnies.  And while I love wildlife, I did not intend to have a garden to feed anyone but myself and my family.  Selfish, I know.  My mom had collected a list of "rabbit-resistant plants", on which hardly any of mine were listed.  We knew we needed a fence.

Enter chicken wire, and the nice lad at Home Depot who looked at the three of us, Husband, Mom, and Me, at nearly 9:00 p.m., and said that yes, he felt sure that three feet of chicken wire would be sufficient to keep out the offending rabbits.  We bought it, with stakes and wire to tie the fencing to the stakes.  Then we came home and Googled to see if we had made the right decision.  And you know what?  We actually had. 

 

The work began with the tilling of the soil.  Then my brother pitched in by taking out two trees my mother was glad to have an excuse to get rid of.  Then my husband pounded stakes and began tying the chicken wire to them.  Then my dad and brother finished hanging the fencing and built a little gate.  Then I started planting a few things, referring constantly to my Pinterest gardening board to see if I could manage to get all my plants planted next to other plants who would be their best friends.  (I think it worked.)

 

A day or two later, I came outside to find that my dad had put in a little stone walkway leading into the garden.  Isn't it darling?  We've had the best time, working on this garden together.  Now that everyone has put so much work into the space, everyone wants it to succeed.  Funny how that works. 

  

 

The next and final touch was to plant marigolds around the border of the garden.  We love marigolds, and we know they are good companions to everyone in the garden.  So while everything we were doing was a tad late in the season, there were still some dandy ones left at the Home Depot garden center.  Plus the pink beauties to stand guard on either side of the gate.  I dare say the little plants felt at home almost immediately.  In fact, I just came back after nearly a week away, and found that most of the little dears had grown to twice their prior size.  YAY.  It makes me so happy to see that they are finally getting close to the size I felt like they should be before I loaded them up and made them travel all the way across the country.  I'll keep you updated with how they do over the next few weeks.

How are your gardens doing?  What are you growing?  I'd love to hear about it!