The Mercy Garden

That's what I have called my vegetable garden. Here's why:

• I didn't test the soil.
• I didn't properly fertilize it (although I added compost mulch about 2 weeks later)
• I didn't really turn the soil, I tilled it a little and put the plants in (at least a week after I bought them)
• And I put the plants really close together

So I knew I'd have to rely on God's mercy if I were to harvest anything. After all I did a lot of things wrong.

But I had to do something. And I figured I didn't have much to lose.

And so far, most plants have produced alright. My peppers haven't produced much, but at least they are producing (although I lost my most productive one, topic for another post). At one point, I thought my cucumbers (and everything else) had a wilting fungus disease. I initially thought it was just poor watering, but then I read a post about how hard it can be to prevent the fungus, and it seemed to come on so suddenly. Given that the author of that post lives in my area, I figured it may have already been in the soil. If anything, I knew the watering (or lack of) contributed to it, even if it meant the plant got weaker because of it. I also thought I had killed one of my cherry tomato plants. This one is in a container, and the soil dries out very quickly. I tried to be better at watering, but it was looking pretty bad. I wish I had taken a picture of it. Upon the advice of my master gardener, I added blood meal (he advised a general fertilizer, but I already had blood meal and read it was good for leaf production) to the container. Then we had a cool, rainy spell and when I went back to my garden, there was new growth on the plant. Now there are tons of flowers, which means more tomatoes! And also after that cool spell, the cucumbers looked better too. More new mercies!

I have taken so many pictures of my garden so I can share it here, but I didn't realize it would take me all summer to post about it. So here they are in a slideshow:

[update 11/13/09] bubbleshare, the service I used for the slideshow will be shut down as of tomorrow. I will repost the pictures at some point. If it's been a while, feel free to ask me where the pics are in the comment section and I'll get back to it :-)