"First Time" Garden Experience

I said in my first posting this year that the word, "first" would appear many times in my entries.  Gardening and growing my own food is something that has always been of interest to me, but I never got around to really doing it.  A colleague of mine from work told me about this great nursery that she had been to and so we decided to check it out this last Saturday.  I loaded the family into the truck and we headed on down the road for a day of gardening adventures.

The nursery is called Arnold's and it it proved to be all I was told it would be.  Not only did they have a great selection of stuff but their employees were friendly and knowledgeable.  We don't have much experience in gardening (actually we have next to none), so we had plenty of questions.

We managed to spend a couple hundred dollars on all kinds of good foods for the garden.  We even picked up a green apple tree for Sam and a lemon tree for my wife.  The lady at the nursery told us, "You'll get 20 lemons out of that tree during the growing season".  Tathiana and I both had to chuckle at this because we used to get 20 lemons a day out of the tree in our front yard in Guatemala.  Plus, we didn't have to take that tree inside when it got cold out. 

There is a garden tiller story that I should tell here.  It's a long story and probably one that only I find interesting.  When we bought the farm, I acquired a small tiller with our farm.  The place we had selected for our garden was, I believe, used for a garden by a previous owner (probably the builder of the house).  Basically, I was busting sod that had been undisturbed for a long time.  I was trudging through this process when my neighbor stopped by to ask me if I wanted to use his tiller.  He told me that he had driven by earlier and saw me wrestling with my machine and thought I might appreciate using his machine.  His, as he said, "Has air in the tires."  

To make a long story short, the tiller was a life saver.  I was under the false assumption that garden tilling required one to drag, push, pull, tussle, and wrestle with a machine in order to get it to till.  My neighbors tiller (which he inherited from his mother-in-law, and incidentally had never used) was the Cadillac of garden tillers.  I did my entire garden in slightly longer than it had taken me to do a few good rows with my old tiller.  In the end, I bought it from his mother-in-law for $300 and a deal to prune here fruit trees and trim her hedges.  

By the time we finished the tilling, planting (of everything except corn), and watering it was 9:30 at night.  We all slept very sound that night.  I'll post more pictures later.