Ummm…tomatoes.




Ray and I started a garden in the spring. I would say that it has done remarkably well, but my main source of comparison is the basil I tried to grow in the window sill at Block 2, so really I don’t have a very broad personal perspective on this sort of thing. Our neighbors also have a garden, and it’s about twice the size of ours. Because of this, at the beginning of the spring, I considered our garden small. Then I realized that most people living around us don’t have gardens at all, so now I brag to my family and coworkers that Ray and I have one of the largest gardens in the neighborhood.

There are at least two things that I have been especially surprised by. One is the power of seeds. The other is cuttings. At first everything we planted came from a nearby nursery and was already a few inches tall. I didn’t have too much trouble believing that those plants would grow since they already looked like they were making good progress. Our neighbor had squash and zucchini seeds out one day and offered some to us. He told me how to plant them – build a small mound, make an indention, drop a few in, and cover them up. That seemed too simple to work, but I humored him and tried it. And holy smokes, in a few weeks we had squash and zucchini plants so big that they were hanging out of the garden and had to be carefully mowed around. The cuttings are pretty remarkable, too, and again this is something I first learned about from the same neighbor. It is possible to snip off a few inches of plant, put it in a glass of shallow water, have it grow roots, replant it, and have it survive as a totally new plant. Pretty sweet. Obviously, from a book-sense standpoint, I knew that seeds would grow, but I didn’t know a thing about cuttings. There is so much to learn from just living in a house with a yard. (And so much to buy, but that’s a different story…)