Update on our Garden

It’s been fun to watch our garden grow over the last couple of weeks. I can definitely tell that they have grown, although Celeste could give you a day-by-day of how many new flowers and how many new vegetables have sprouted. She really enjoys spending time in the garden, especially now that her office has moved to our apartment and the garden is right outside. We made a bet on what vegetable would be ready first -- we both guessed cucumber. But the first vegetable was actually a green pepper. It was very tasty. That was about two weeks ago, and a week ago, the first cucumber was picked. I wasn’t there for the honors since I had a short trip to Dallas (by short, I flew in at 12:30 am and left the same day at 8:00 pm). So I enjoyed the cucumber through Celeste’s description. She said that it was very good. We've since picked a few more cucumbers and green peppers, and they have all been wonderful.

There are some fun things we’ve learned from our garden. First of all, squirrels apparently like strawberries, since strawberries keep disappearing before fully ripe. Celeste keeps thinking that it is me. It isn’t, though. We have a family of squirrels living in the tree on our patio. We haven’t caught them in the act, yet, but we think it’s them.

Herbs straight from the garden are wonderful! Fresh parsley is wonderful! Fresh basil is wonderful! Fresh cilantro is wonderful! You might be interested to see what cilantro looks like when you let it grow past its edible stage (you know, the fresh cilantro bunches you buy in the store). Once cilantro gets to a certain point, it grows flowers and seeds and loses the “cilantro” flavor. It actually looks like a giant weed. That isn’t a weed, though. We’ve been keeping our garden weed-free. We’ll probably plant it in a separate container next time, but for now, it towers over the green onions. One other interesting thing is that the seeds that grow on the cilantro plant are called coriander. Who knew? I guess the bigger question, though – who knows what coriander is? I didn’t even know it existed until Celeste told me.

The last fun thing about our garden is our new drip irrigation system. When we went to Monterey for the three-day Memorial Day weekend, we weren’t sure who to get to water our garden. So, we installed a drip irrigation system and a timer. Now, we don’t have to worry at all about watering, because it self waters everyday at the same specified timed. It’s great. Low maintenance gardening.

An example of the hose that connects all our plants.


The water timer for auto-watering convenience.
For more pictures, go to our Picture Album.