Gardening 101

So this weekend, in the 95 degree weirdo weather, MIL-ette decided to help me plant my first ever vegetable garden. For those of you that don't yet know, I am a city girl living on a big old farm in the "country," as Ette1 likes to say, and I have a fenced-in vegetable garden bigger than most people's apartments in NYC. For this I was terrified when I first saw the thing. BUT...Sunday we decided to take a stab at it. Now, I don't have a green thumb. I've been known to kill a silk plant, so everyone is kind of wary of me actually trying to grow foodstuffs. But I am determined to prove everyone wrong. So last week I went out and got myself prepared for the occasion. I got some new gloves, one of those cushy, smushy knee pads to keep yourself happy when kneeling in dirt, all sorts of tools, and of course.....packets upon packets of seeds.

Well MIL-ette took one look at all my seed packets and said, 'That's it, we're goin' to the nursery.' So off we went and bought little starter plants of just about everything under the sun. I've got 13 different kinds of tomatoes growing in there, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant...like I said, I'm a real Martha.

But I still had all these dang seed packets, and these days I'm not one to let things go to waste, so we decided we would plant some things from seeds and call it a "learning garden." (That's MIL-ette's nice way of telling me I might fail miserably at this exercise, but it sure will be a learning experience, and I probably won't make the same mistake twice!)

So there we are, shvitzing like Jews in the desert, drinking our Italian spritzers on ice and taking multiple "shade" breaks. We've got seed packets for days, and each one I open has seeds smaller than the packet before it. I'm talking SMALL. Like, microscope small. Have you ever tried to plant zucchini?? Well these instructions on the back of each packet require an MBA in statistics just to get them straight. They say things like:

"Plant in trench in full sun after last frost 1/4" deep, 3" space, 4 seeds."

WTF does that even mean? So there I am measuring out neat little rows, dropping these minuscule dots into the earth (which btw is cow manure, b/c that's apparently how gardens grow - in shit) and then cursing because I drop the sucker and can't find it to ensure it's 1/4" deep.

By the end of the day I was just sprinkling seeds like rain showers over the damn thing and praying that I don't invent some evil hybrid watermatoe, or pumpkumber or something that attracts rabid bunnies.

Since Sunday I have become near obsessed with the garden. I am out there two times a day watering the thing, and I just stand there at the fence and look at everything, as if in 2 days things were supposed to grow. Yes, I am impatient. And no, I will not share my garden booty with you. Only MIL-ette, because she shvitzed in shit for me. That's love.