Posts Tagged "3037 montclair circle smyrna georgia 30080"

So Priscilla and I have this house we bought.  We are on our way to being completely domesticated.  And on our journey, we decided to build a garden in our new backyard.  There is a small area between our lawn and our house located on the back wall that stretches about 20 feet across.  It gets direct sun about half the day, so we decided this was the best spot to start our little experiment.  Now, growing things is pretty foreign to Priscilla and I so we asked my parents to help out with some gardening knowledge to get us started in the right direction.  When they came to visit in May for my birthday, they were ready to get dirty.

My mom suggested that we plant the following:  2 Tomato plants, 1 yellow bell pepper plant, 1 jalapeno plant, 1 zucchini plant and 2 yellow squash plants.  It seemed like the perfect plan, so we bought our seedlings and our seeds and started digging.  The first thing we discovered was that our perfect little spot was covered with rocks and full of this red clay dirt that was incredibly hard.  So we had our hands full right off the bat.  We picked so many rocks our we were able to create a stone border around our plants.   It actually looked pretty awesome.

After the preparation was done, we dug our holes and planted our garden.  It was pretty impressive.  With no surprise it didn’t do much for the first couple of weeks.  Eventually we saw the squash and zucchini sprout out of the ground and makes it’s way upward.  The tomatoes, jalapenos, and bell peppers  were seedlings when we started so we knew they would make it without much work, but it gives you a strange kind of accomplishment when you grow things from seeds.  We watered every other day if it didn’t rain as it does so often in the Southern Summers.  We kept an eye on them until all of a sudden we had a garden.

The tomatoes shot into the air engulfing the wire cage we gave them for support.  The zucchini and squash slowly creeped into leafy bushes with bright yellow flowers.  The jalapenos and bell peppers grew to about 3 feet before they started growing small white and yellow flowers followed by small vegetables.  Yep, I said vegetables.

The tomatoes started and never stopped.  We have more now then we will ever need.  The jalapenos kept coming too.  I never have wanted more uses for jalaponeos then right now.  We put them in everything and they are hot.  Really hot.

But, the bell pepers never really did much.  We started to see flowers and then we saw a small pepper starting to grow.  That was over a month ago now.  It has materialized a little, and has recently strated to turnh yellow (they are yellow bell peppers) but not much else has happened.  A small second pepper has started to grow, but that is it.  As pathetic as the peppers have been, the Summer Squash and the Zuchini have done much worse.

LKike I said before, the plants grew.  They grew into large vines with think leaves and giant yellow flowers, but thats when it got strange.  They got a fungus called Powdery Mildew.  It created a lite white powder that covered all the leaves and eventually killed them.  At first I had no idea what it was so I just strated chopping the infected leaves away.  When I was done there wasn’t much left.  I read later in a book Priscilla gave me for our one year aniverary, that all we needed was some spray I could buy at Target.  I bought some and sprayed it on the leaves that were still standing and all of a sudden I felt like an ideot.  The plants tried to come back.  They really did.  But ever time a fruit would strat to grow, it would die.  Eventually, it was littered with white flies and roating veggies.  Last night, I cut them all down.

But at least we still have our tomatoes and our jalaopenos.  They are striving.  And our peppers are trying to produce they just aren’t doing that well at it.  Maybe a few more months.  They better hurry up though cause its only getting colder from here on out.  But so far it has all been a great learning experience.  Even with our plants still producing I am excited about next year.  I think I might try out some of the same stuff and maybe some new things too.  And next time I will take care of that Powdery Mildew before it starts.