About a month ago I wandered into the local 99 cent store looking for nothing in particular, which is always a bad idea because 567 random things that I am only buying because, “they are soooo cheap” can quickly add up at 99 cents each!  This time I scored 6 medium sized terracotta flower pots, a tomato Topsy Turvy, and some tomato seedlings. Since I have the black thumb of death I figured it would be fun for Ben and I to get crafty, paint the pots and maybe grow something in them. Well, we did! We painted the pots, and went to Lowe’s to pick out some flowers to plant but Ben thought that flowers weren’t cool enough and said we should grow some things that we could eventually eat. I know nothing about keeping common house plants alive and actually killed a cactus once so gardening is definitely not something that I would add to my resume. I gave in to my little negotiator and we left Lowe’s with a huge bag of potting soil (that I ripped an even huger hole in when I was trying to shove it into the trunk of my car), 2 cucumber seedlings, a watermelon seedling and more tomato plants, because my kid is a tomato junkie and will eat them until his guts explode.

We got home and got to work, we carefully planted all of our new vegetables/fruits in their beautifully decorated pots and I said a prayer that they didn’t die right off the bat since Ben seemed to be super excited about them. I always forget to water things so it kind of worked out when I added “watering plants” to the list of chores my kid can do in order to earn privileges, and he will do anything for 30 minutes to play video games every night. The plants seemed happy, I put the pots in a spot in our yard that got enough sun for all of them and Ben remembered to water them every day when he got home from school. The next week my boyfriend surprised us and bought a bunch of lumber to build a planter box for our new little garden. The heat was really on now, I mean what went from a 40.00 trip to the 99 cent store and Lowe’s turned into 100.00 worth of lumber and an expectation that I was actually going to be able to grow something edible.

Yesterday, after I attempted to get rid of the margarita ickiness I had leftover from the night before with French toast and lots of coffee, we spent the rest of the morning at Home Depot picking up more dirt for our garden and some more seeds to plant. Apparently you can’t have a garden without planting carrots and radishes! I got a little sentimental and remembered how my Papa would plant peas every year and I would sit in his garden with one of his old hats on eating my weight in peas fresh from the pods, it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. After my little trip down memory lane, I threw an envelope of peas into the cart and we were on our way home.

After changing into what I thought was the perfect gardening outfit, being made fun of for said gardening outfit and whining about schlepping ridiculously heavy bags of dirt across the lawn, we filled the planter box with dirt and mixed in some fertilizer.  I replanted all of our original plants, then Ben & our neighbors little boy planted the seeds we bought. The man of the house broke down the “garden rules” for the boys, we watered everything and we were done! I am not sure how this will work out but I am excited to see if we can actually grow edible things.