Stepping back in time.

Since D's schedule is too busy to accommodate things like the internet blog-o-sphere, she's e-mailed the pictures she took of the garden to me and I am going to write about them here instead. That way your gratification is a little closer to instant than it would be otherwise.

I promise more recent pictures will follow soon. I'm working on getting my camera back from its vacation in Seattle, and garden pictures are top on my list once it's back in my hot little hands.
Additionally, please excuse any lack of detail in this post--we've had the garden up for about 3 weeks now, so my memory is fading smidge when it comes to the particulars of that Saturday.

So, without further adieu, we began with some starter veggies.

After my tutoring class fell through on Saturday morning, D and I decided to take advantage of the beautiful clear Saturday, and put our garden plans into action.
We started off at Pistil's on Mississippi and A-Boy on Barbur. Both places had nice green veggie starts, and we found some lovely perennials and other fun growy things. All the garden departments of the grocery and home improvement stores were having big 30%-off sales to celebrate the onset of fall, so we took advantage of that and bought some great-looking terra-cotta pots, too.

Run-down of the plants we purchased:

First, the veggies and herbs:

• Broccoli
• Kale
• Chard
• Lettuce (like 12 kinds including Romaine, Buttercrunch, and "Fancy Gourmet Mix"
• Red Onions
• Lavender
• Rosemary
• Sage

Then the other fun plants:

• Lambs' Ears
• Mums
• Hosta
  
• Something neat with red and green leaves
• Colorful marigolds, pansies, and red flowers for my hanging basket

Of course we decided to buy the plants first. Luckily it was only a summer-like weekend, and so they didn't die in the car as we went about our other various missions.

Our next stop was to Metro on Swan Island for a big composter. As I mentioned before, it looks rather like a space-ship. It's big and black and plastic. It was fun squeezing it in to D's little Honda civic!
Finally, we took a trip to the Rebuilding Center on N. Mississippi for our grand plan, drawers.

That's right, dresser drawers to stand in for planter boxes. We are relying purely on faith that they are not loaded with lead paint. (If these blog entries start getting a little off-kilter sounding, please be a friend and take us to the hospital? Or at least encourage us to stop eating the killer-lettuce?)

Neither one of us had been there before, so it was an interesting challenge. We found what we were looking for in the end, though, and so we left, a heap of drawers in hand.

As you can see, the car was groaning with all our purchases for this project. Luckily, this time of year, garden supplies are quite reasonable.

Long story short, we unloaded the car and set to work filling the "planters" with potting soil and arranging them in our predetermined garden area.

I will thrill you a little more with some pictures of the close to finished product. Of course it was an all-day event that entailed driving to Fred Meyer once or twice to acquire more potting soil, more perennials, and more fizzy carbonated refreshments.

But now we have little square drawers filled with rows of growy things! I've since planted radishes (that are in terrible need of a thinning!) and some seeds for acorn squash. We'll see how that all turns out. I'm skeptical (especially of the Acorn Squash) that we'll have anything edible before next March. But, all doubts aside, we will definitely have lettuce in another week or two. The plants have continued to grow like crazy. They're spreading their leaves to the sky and growing up green and tasty-looking. YUM! Maybe if you're nice I'll invite you over for a home grown salad.

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We also have tomatoes! Those were here when we adopted the house. They're nice, though, huh? Word has it they're awfully tasty, too.