I Hate My Neighbor Because His Garden is Prettier Than Mine

We moved into our house almost three months ago. I was a square-foot gardener at my old house. Now I’m an in-the-ground gardener. Making the switch wasn’t easy, people. There are weeds freaking everywhere! The leaves on my tomatoes are curling and I’m guessing I’m missing some nutrient in the soil but I don’t know because I didn’t hand-make the soil like I did with my square foot garden.

When we first moved in, we dug all the grass and weeds up from the area where the former owners had a garden. There were a lot of weeds – a lot of mint and a big, dead blueberry bush. The garden sloped down a small hill. We ended up making steps for each level of the garden. It was kind of like rice fields in China, except small and ugly.

I knew the soil had a lot of clay in it, so I added some compost and garden soil to make it more loamy or whatever. I planted my tomatoes and pepper plants. That night it rained.

Apparently, we had dug trenches instead of steps. The plants were sitting in two inches of water when I went out to check on them. Immediately, I made a way for the water to run off so the plants wouldn’t stay flooded. I learned a lesson: don’t dig trenches in your garden, especially when the soil is like play-doh.

My new neighbor is a first-year square-foot gardener. He has two square foot gardens. The wood is fresh. Everything is verdant. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect.

I hate him.

I peeked through the bushes when he wasn’t home to take this photo. He even built a bench with the left-over wood. Gah!

His garden is pretty and perfect. I used to have a pretty and perfect garden. I used to be a square-foot gardener. Now I don’t know what in the heck I’m doing. I’m digging trenches, my tomato leaves are curling and the weeds are overwhelming. I could make enough After Eight dinner mints to supply the entire Chicagoland area for the next 20 years with the amount of mint in my garden. No lie, check it out.

I write a gardening blog and I don’t even know how to garden. My blog should be called “I Try to Grow Mint.” I could totally rock that blog.

Part of my mint problem has to do with my laziness, obviously. At my old house, I was in my garden multiple times a day. My bedroom window overlooked my garden. In my new house, I can’t see my garden from inside my house. I’d like to say that “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but in this case it seems to be more of “out of sight, out of mind.” I’ve been neglectful of my garden and it’s showing.

So my project for the fall will be to dig up all that mint and get rid of it. In the spring I’ll work on making the soil better. And then I’ll kick my neighbor’s square-foot gardening rear end.

P.S. What in the heck do I even do with mint? I don’t have a single mint recipe. Please help! (don’t say tea, I don’t like tea)

I Accidentally On Purpose Grew Weeds Up a Trellis

A few weeks ago, this plant started growing in my garden. I didn’t know what it was. I figured maybe there were seeds left in the ground from the previous owners. We moved to this house just two months ago.

I looked at this beautiful plant with its broad leaves and yellow flowers and thought, maybe it’s a cantaloupe. I’ve never grown cantaloupe before, so I wasn’t really sure what it looked like. My sister is growing cantaloupe in her garden (this is her first year gardening) so I sent her a picture and asked her if it looked like her cantaloupe. She said, yes, it looked like what she had in her garden.

So, I got my trellis out of the garage and put it in the ground and strung it up. I guided the plant through the strings. And then I waited a few days.

Then I noticed two more cantaloupe plants growing right near my trellis. Perfect! I thought, I am so lucky the previous owners grew cantaloupe. I love those old house owners.

Then a week went by and I noticed the cantaloupe was still growing straight up. Don’t cantaloupe vines grow along the ground and you have to guide them up a trellis?

The cantaloupe kept growing. I waited another week and continued to water them regularly.

My sister came over and I said, come out and look at my cantaloupe. I’m not sure if it’s cantaloupe. Aren’t they supposed to grow like a vine?

She took one look at it and said, “No, that’s not cantaloupe. I don’t know what that is, some sort of weed. That doesn’t look anything like a cantaloupe plant.”

So, for the past three weeks, I, the gardening blogger, have been accidentally on purpose training weeds to grow up a trellis. Thank goodness this is a humor blog!

I searched on the internet to find out what in the heck I’ve been growing. It turns out to be a common wildflower in Illinois, called Velvetleaf. It’s often found in vacant lots, construction sites and waste areas – like my garden. One of the more interesting things the IllinoisWildflowers.com shared about this plant was that, “Velvetleaf is a rather tall and lanky plant with large leaves that is easy to identify in the field because there is really nothing else that resembles it.”

No, I’m sorry, IT LOOKS LIKE CANTALOUPE! Broad leaves? Yellow flowers? Cantaloupe!

OMG, this looks NOTHING like cantaloupe.

Here’s what a cantaloupe plant really looks like (from my sister’s garden)…

I can’t believe I’ve spent the last three weeks growing weeds up a trellis.

Have you ever done something embarrassing in your garden like this? (Please say, yes.)

A Quick and Easy Way to Dry Herbs from Your Garden

I have a few herbs growing in my garden: oregano, basil, chives, thyme, and mint. One of the things I like to do when I have an abundance of any one herb is to dry it to use during the winter.

I’ve tried two methods of drying herbs: Hanging herbs to dry and using an electric dehydrator.

Hanging Herbs to Dry

My husband got me this sweet herb drying rack a few years ago. You hang a few stems of leaves on it leave them to dry.

But this crap takes for-EVAH. Ain’t nobody got time for dat. I mean, it looks pretty (if you like dead leaves hanging from your ceiling) and it’s the most natural way to dry them as it doesn’t require any electricity. But I left those suckers on there for two weeks and when it’s hot and humid in the summer that stuff never fully dries. The basil leaves were almost gummy. They just wouldn’t crumble. So, I tried the dehydrator.

Using an Electric Dehydrator

I don’t have one of those fancy expensive dehydrators. I have one that I got at one of those Christmas Steal-a-gift gift exchanges that I despise. But the year I won this, I actually liked the game. Every other year I’ve gotten a foot massager or Snuggie or some super lame gift someone picked up at Walgreens on their way to the party.

Now, I’m sure this dehydrator was probably picked up at Walgreens too, but whatever, I love this thing. Not only do I use it for herbs, but for apple rings in the fall. I tried drying tomatoes one year, but they were kind of meh.

How to use the dehydrator:

I wash my herbs (if I’m not too lazy) and lay them out on the drying racks so they’re not touching.

I have five racks, so I can dry a lot of herbs. I plug the machine in – it’s so cheap, there’s not even an “on” switch – and walk away for about 45 minutes. After that I check on them every 30 minutes and rotate the racks up and down, as necessary, so the herbs get even drying times. Sometimes, if the herbs are small, they’re dry within 45 minutes.

The only issue I have with the dehydrator is that some of the herbs, like, thyme, are so small that they fall between the cracks of the racks. I just have to be extra gentle when removing those since they’re so fragile. But then I just take the racks off and flip the dehydrator upside-down and…clean! – so I don’t know why I’m complaining.

I take the dried herbs off the rack, pull the leaves off the stems, crush them up and put them in a resealable bag or glass jar. I label it with the herb and date. And no matter how I store it, it looks like pot.

I’ve read that you can dry herbs in a microwave and in a paper bag, but I’ve been so pleased with my dehydrator that I’ve never tried those methods. How about you?

What’s your experience with drying herbs?

 

Kids in the Garden…More Like Kids Fighting in the Garden

I was planning to write a post about gardening with kids. Everyone’s writing them. They write about the joys of digging in the dirt with their kids and seeing the smiles on their faces when they bite into that first home-grown vegetable the child raised themselves.

But then I thought about it and realized, I don’t really like gardening with my kids.

You’d think as a homeschooling mom that I’d be overjoyed to incorporate living off the land into our curriculum. And I was. Until we actually tried it.

One early spring day I decided to pull out my seeds and plant a few in peat pots to prepare for the summer. I thought, the kids will love this. I’ll teach them about plant propagation, the importance of watering seedlings, and giving the plants enough light and nutrients. They’ll watch the entire life cycle from seed to our bellies. We’ll make charts and draw pictures and this will be our entire science curriculum for half a year. It’ll be great!

Nope.

This is how it went.

I carefully laid newspaper down on the floor, but kids are kind of messy. Did you know that? Before we even got the seeds out, soil was all over the basement. My kids looked like Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. It wasn’t fun…for me.

So, when the weather warmed up, I tried again, outside.

I gave my, then four-year-old, daughter a shovel and showed her where to dig in my square foot garden. I came back a few minutes later and all the soil was outside the garden, on the grass!

So then I thought, forget the digging, I’ll just let them plant the seeds. So they picked out sunflower seeds and we planted those in separate pots. The biggest mistake I made was, of course, not labeling the pots. Not with the tag “sunflower,” which I did, but with each of my kids’ names. Because here’s what happens when you forget to label with your kids’ names:

Kid 1: You watered my sunflower! MOM! He watered my sunflower! That’s MY sunflower!
Kid 2: No. This is MY sunflower. See, your pot had a chip in it.
Kid 1: No it didn’t! YOUR pot had a chip! That’s my pot!
Kid 2: No, it’s not.
Me: (squeezes bridge of nose)
Kid 1: YES, IT IS! (kicks watering can over)
Kid 2: (laughs at the drama of the kicked can)
Kid 1: (screams loudly enough for neighbors 60 houses away to hear)

And that’s when I quit and decided I don’t really like gardening with my kids.

I don’t like messes, I don’t like my valuable dirt all over the grass, and I don’t care for fights over stupid pots. I love my kids, but I don’t want to garden with them. It’s one of the few times I allow myself to get away…aside from after bedtime when I binge-watch Lost on Netflix for three hours.

I’ll let my kids play with the worms in my worm farm and I’ve caught my five-year-old digging through the compost bin. I’m cool with all that. But that’s about all I can handle.

My sons aren’t much into it anyway, I asked them what they think of gardening and they said, “boring” and “it’s too much work.” When I was a kid, my dad worked in the yard and he enjoyed it.  At the time my thoughts on all things yard were the same as my kids’ thoughts: BOR-ING. But by the time I hit my thirties and had a yard of my own, I suddenly liked yard work. So maybe my love for it will rub off on my kids. I hope.

My nine-year-old is beginning to appreciate gardening…a little bit. I gave him a pot to grow carrots this year. He’s growing orange, white and purple ones. He hates carrots, but at least he’s growing something. He filled the pot with dirt and planted the seeds. He started out watering them, but after a few weeks he forgot, so I took over. Everyday he asks to pick a carrot even though they’re not ready. He sees stuff happening. I guess it’s kind of fun. As long as he doesn’t touch my garden.

Do you enjoy gardening with kids? Am I the only one that doesn’t really like it?