How does your Garden grow?

I love gardening. I don't always have the energy required for it, but I love it. There is nothing like sticking your hands into Mother Earth, putting something there to grow and nurture until it comes up and awes you with the creation. The colors the earth can produce! Oh, it's lovely.

What's better than just a garden though? A vegetable garden.

And we have a plan in the workings for this year's vegetables already.

My canning book came this morning. This was a bit of a splurge for us, let me tell you. It was only $20 but for us, sometimes that's a lot. However, we got the hardcover edition, so it'll last a bit longer, and I love this book. It shouldn't be an issue to turn it into something that my daughter will treasure long after I am gone.

Anyhow, so I went through and decided what I would like to be able to can at the harvest time and added up the pounds of tomatoes I will need. I then found that on average a Roma tomato plant should produce 13 lbs of tomatoes-but if you do well, it could give you up to 20 lbs! Of course, I go with the lower number, as it is my first year actually putting some true effort into growing and growing them on time.

I am not joking, I need to plant at least 10 tomato plants this year--and this coming from a girl who hates tomatoes on her burgers. But, I love pasta and salsa and will put canned tomatoes in nearly everything.

I will also be planting at least 6 jalepeno plants. Andrew and I tend to enjoy hot food. We have begun to find that at least once a month I am purchasing little jars of canned jalepenos! So, this year, I hope to can enough to counter balance that! My book isn't perfect, it did not have this recipe in it, but I found one online.

We also intend to do 1 or 2 bell pepper plants. Mostly to add a little something to our salsa and for use at harvest time.

I have not decided on any further vegetables to be planted. It sort of depends on how this spring goes for us. We have two sheds, they came with the house. We are trying to eliminate our need for the back shed as it is pretty deteriorated. It has been patched together by so many previous owners (and by various materiels) that it's just not worth that precious space that we could have our garden in. If for some reason, we cannot eliminate that shed, or if we cannot plant where it is due to soil conditions, than we will put the plants into large pails this year.


I am also excited for my flowers this year. I was able to get some of those going last year, which was so much fun. I will wait to see what comes in nicely for us and go from there, but there will surely be some impatiens and petunias in honor of my grandmother.

So tell me, what do you grow? How do you decide? Do you plant anything to honor anyone in particular?