Gardening – Walt in PA

Several months ago my wife and I were discussing a garden at our new home. We scoped out a handful of locations in the yard but never committed because we didn't want to interfere with space for our daughter to play. When our deck was built, I kicked around the idea of wrapping a portion of it with raised beds for our garden. My wife pointed out that we had several trees in the area and that shade may be a problem. She was right, the trees could pose a problem to full sun vegetables but the location was perfect. Not only would the raised beds be out of the way, they would also hide the underside of the deck as the vegetables grew. We went back and forth with it for a while before I threw caution to the wind and started digging to set the boxes. The garden was completed at the end of May and before long we had both plants and seeds in the ground. Despite the trees causing periods of shade during the day, the garden has been doing very well for us. Last week, after a storm rolled through, my daughter and I went out to tend to the garden. Two of our tomato plants had grown so large that the wind knocked the cages over. I tied them off to the deck and began the process of harvesting some of the leafy vegetables. When my daughter and I walked back into the house, we were carrying more lettuce, spinach, and basil than we could eat for dinner and wound up using it over a couple of days. Mixed days of rain and sun have had the garden growing at a frantic pace and it looks as if I should do some more harvesting of the leafy greens. The tomato plants are most likely going to kill off the spinach (which was planted in front of the tomato - not expecting the tomatoes to become so bushy) but everything else seems to be doing well. It is nice to grow your own food. Now if only I could keep the luck going and get myself a deer, a few geese, and maybe a few doves come hunting season, we will be in great shape.