Here is how our seedlings are doing. They are getting so big! Wow what a mom thing to say huh? I'm really should be replanting these suckers. Next year I will definitely be using cups or something instead of the little thingies they are in now. Most of what you see are bean plants and pumpkins. Hopefully the neighborhood cats don't eat all the beans up again this year. I mean really last year to look out into our
fenced in garden and see a big 'ole cat eating the green bean plants was just too crazy.
This is the state of our garden boxes. We still haven't been able to get dirt to fill them although we have hope for this weekend. Photo Dude and I have a great place near us that has composted mulch and that is what we will be filling quite a bit of these boxes with. Our hope is to till up the soil that is there, fill in more dirt and then top with mulch. The dirt in this section of the yard seems very good so we are going to just use what we've got instead of paying a lot of money for new dirt.
Our thoughts for next year are much bigger. Ya' see that strip of yard between the fences and the shed? Our thoughts are to till up all of that for a huge in ground garden. Then we will plant something like arborvitae to block the view from the street and cut down on the neighborhood kids cutting through our side yard. The photo to the left is taken from Google Earth and is of our house with the plans for next year colored in. So what do you think?
Back a few years ago we tried to grow potatoes in a five gallon bucket. Unfortunately the experiment was not a success. At the end of the growing season all we had to show for the effort were a few handfuls of marble sized potatoes. After the failure we decided to read up on how to grow potatoes (no we didn't do that first). Did you know you are supposed to 'hill' potatoes?! Sure you did because everyone knows that, well except for us we didn't know that. Anyway we decided to try it again this year with a little more knowledge and a little bit bigger buckets. I went to TSC and got water buckets from the horse/barnyard animal department. The color choice was made by the kids they actually agreed on the color! It was a small miracle. After we got the buckets we took them home and explained our plan to Jeff and then told him he needed to go with us and get dirt. It was a little like how I got my garden last year. Buy half the stuff then he will feel the need to help us with the rest.... I'm evil like that. We went to several stores and got a bunch of different opinions about the soil we needed. As with many things we decided to just wing it and got the supplies you see in the first photo. Jeff grabbed one of the spare barrels and mixed them all together. We let it all sit for a few days and incorporate. Or we got busy, something like that. Jeff drilled holes in the bottom of the buckets for drainage and we got some stones from the neighbors for the bottom of the buckets. In theory it will help the water drain without all the soil also leaking out. Well that's the way it's supposed to work for house plants right? 
These are the potatoes. I purchased them from one of the stands at the Farmer's Market. She gave me some advice about planting spaces and whatnot. She's great and sells 50# bags of potatoes for $8 if you don't mind a mixed bag of the not so pretty ones. Can't beat that with a stick right? 
So we (Jeff) planted the potato bits and then hauled them to the back rock area. We didn't water the soil because rain was expected that night. If you would like a great link to learn more about growing potatoes try this one. Have a great week.
