Gardens Begun, 2015

We got our gardens in a full two weeks earlier this year than we did last year, which raised my hopes for an even better harvest.  Then the rains came and never stopped.

This year has been the most discouraging year for our garden yet, and it was strangely comforting when my mom said it's the worst year she's ever had for gardening in her nearly 4 decades of Nanticoke gardening.

The gardens have since perked up, and they look relatively lush, but their many bare spots attest to too many drowned seeds and seedlings to believe.  Out of 600 onion sets, less than a third survived the rains.  Only a quarter of our beets survived, half of our peas (and that with 2 or 3 re-plantings), a third of our zucchini, 2/3 of our tomatoes, none of our eggplant, half the brussels sprouts, and the list goes on.

I took a few pictures of the gardens before I discovered we lived in a monsoon region.  These early pictures ooze hopefulness, which is funny in retrospect. 

We planted 5 packets of sunflowers and assorted flowers here.  About one foot of nasturtiums popped up in the middle of weeds.  

Dude passed along blackberry and raspberry plants, which love water after transplanting.  (Only three died, Dude!  The rest are doing beautifully.)

Out of 60 pumpkin seeds, one measly seed came up.  We have hopes for a pumpkin or two, though!

I took pictures of the upper garden and lower garden before we put down black plastic. If you can see the plants among the rocks, they still looked fairly healthy here at the beginning.  (And, yes, we remove wheelbarrows of rocks every single year.  It doesn't matter.)

Lower:

Upper:

Lower after laying down plastic:

The painful, middle stretch of our growing (dying) season was completely undocumented.  I barely wanted to go in the gardens, let alone take depressing pictures of them.  I'll try to take a few before the season ends, though, to marvel at the big, green plants that God gave us in spite of so many setbacks.