My Green Thumb - Writing Challenge, Day 6

Gardening has never really been something I did until Darryl and I bought our house.  My grandparents all have major green thumbs and always have, so I felt like I had some big shoes to fill.

Last year, I bought a ton of flowers and planted them in our front and back flower beds.  They were gorgeous, and I loved them.

I did have to do some work to one of the back beds so that it wouldn't kill everything put into it; the soil wasn't the best.  I didn't do any of that this year since it had just been refreshed last year, and so far, everything has been doing pretty well.

This year, I decided that instead of spending all the money I spent last year on young plants, I would buy a bunch of seeds and try to grow them myself.  I also decided to focus more on vegetables than flowers.  I planted sunflowers, tomatoes, banana peppers, and lettuce.  I didn't plant until the end of May, which I regret a little bit now, so my plants aren't fully grown yet, but my peppers are doing pretty well.  Two of the plants are already yielding peppers.  The other four have grown much slower for some reason.

My tomatoes...  I have twelve plants.  Twelve!  I didn't think they would all sprout.  I was completely wrong...  They were planted in June because the original seeds I planted didn't sprout...hence thinking these wouldn't either and planting more...but they're growing quickly.

The lettuce grew like crazy.  I've had a good bit of it for salads, and it's soooo much better than grocery store lettuce.  I grew it in three pots, and it was the easiest thing to grow.  I'd highly recommend that if you don't grow anything else, to at least grow some lettuce if that's something you use often.

I also planted some green peppers and some flowers I thought I might put in the front flower beds or create a couple other beds to put them into (a goal for next year), but so far, none of that stuff has grown.

I also have twelve sunflowers....same deal as the tomatoes.  Planted the first batch (five of them) at the end of May....only one came up.  So I planted more at the same time I planted the tomatoes.  Every. Single. One. Grew. *facepalm*  So now there are two in a back flower bed with the tomatoes, two out front, and a line of them along the sunny side of the house.  The first one that I planted is taller than me, and the second batch are all probably about 2-3 feet tall at this point.

These were the only flowers I bought this year - got two of them on clearance at Walmart for $1 each and couldn't pass them up!

It's a small little garden overall, but it's the first one I've ever put out, so I'm proud of it!  Next year I'm pretty sure I'm going to try some squash, beans, and maybe a couple of other things in addition to this stuff.