How Does My Garden Grow?

Remember, many years back -like probably 40 some, it was the in thing to take nursery rhymes and kind of twist them around a bit? I used to know a kazillion of those back then. One of my favorites was "Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and one gosh darned potato!"

Well, my little garden doesn't have any silver bells, or cockle shells, nor does it even have any potatoes in it but by gosh, by golly, it is definitely growing!

Just check these pictures out here if you don't believe me.
Here's what my garden looked like back on June 17th -a mere 12 days ago.

And, here's what it looked like this past Saturday -June 27th.
Here's the lettuce, beets, carrots, peas and first row of the green beans as they were two days ago -on Saturday.
This is what the lettuce, beets, carrots -and that tiny bit of green you can maybe see if you enlarge the picture, between the lettuce and the beets/carrots row, is my green onions and this was TODAY - a mere two days later!
This -above -is the middle section of the garden -from left to right as the picture faces you -peas, two rows of green beans and my cukes -then the corn at the far right.
And here's the peas and green beans as they are today!


And finally, here's the cukes and corn as seen today.
Trust me when I tell you this, considering I am the original "black-thumb gardener" that I am absolutely astonished to see these things flourishing like this in my own backyard! Amazing. Incredible, the sights I saw there today!

It's been well over twenty years since the last time I got brave and/or crazy -call it what you wish -and tried to have a vegetable garden here. Two, maybe three years running, I had the back lot all plowed up and harrowed and meticulously marked out rows in which I planted oodles more than I have in this little "victory" garden (if you will) this year. Heck, I planted lettuce, radishes, onions, peas, carrots, beets, green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, cucumbers, squash -all that good stuff in that big old plot.

And, each year as the stuff would start to come up, it would either be eaten immediately by either deer or rabbits -or some other wildebeast known in these parts maybe, or it would just flat out die on me!

My late neighbor, Howard Nelson, who was a fantastic gardener and one who often would swap trade secrets of the home gardening trade with my Grandpa -who, by the way, always had huge and beautiful veggie gardens -would tell me that if my Grandfather were alive to see my attempts at growing stuff, he would be shocked and immediately sent on to eternity by the sight there.

Well, I hope by saying this that I don't jinx myself now, but I hope Grandpa can see this little bit of a garden of mine from where ever he is in heaven and can quit laughing like a loon at my misfortune in the garden department.

Now, let's see how much produce I actually will be able to glean from this puppy in the near future too. My last garden yielded one (yes, 1 -one) cup of peas and that was it!

So let's all cross our fingers and pray! Okay?