Gardening Addiction

It is time to plant my vegetable garden.  Based on previous years success and the amount of money we spend on the garden I am pretty sure this is not a good idea.  However, for some reason I just can not stop.

This year I took a gardening class on growing tomatoes and peppers.  I learned a lot.  First, there is not any benefit to planting too early which is something I always do.  As soon as I see the plants at the store I buy them even though it is still too cold.  Heck, I was standing in line paying for my plants the other day and the lady behind me even said something about it begin too wet to plant.
Anyway, this year I tried to bribe myself by allowing myself to buy some herbs but I put them in pots instead of the garden.

Then I decided to do a mail order from Burpee.  The advantage of buying from this company is that they will not mail the plants until it is safe for me to plant in my time zone.  Unfortunately they arrived the other day looking puny but what can I do.  I planted them.

My teacher at the tomato class said that watering to encourage deep roots is the best thing I can do for my plants.  It should prevent blossom end rot which happens to my tomatoes every year.  So Mike decided to put in a drip watering system.  Since not all plants need to be watered on the same schedule he had to put in two lines and buy different size drip heads to get just the right amount of water to each plant.  Between the expense for this, the rock, the new raised beds, the fencing around the garden and the replacement potting soil, these vegetables and herbs are getting a bit pricey.

Of course, vegetable gardening takes a lot of time too.  Mike installed the rock so that he would not have to spend so much time weeding around the beds.  My tomato teacher suggested we mulch are raised beds too not only to stop weeds but to hold the water in the ground.  So we will be trying that trick this year too, once we finally have all the vegetables planted and the sprinkling system installed.

Gardening is addicting because just as the failures overwhelm me, we have a success.  When Mike was cleaning out the raised beds we discovered one of those.  He took the discarded soil over to our soil trash heap and found one of last years supposedly dead plants growing there!  If vegetables can grow without a drip watering system and fertilizer but with weeds surely if I spoil them in my garden with regular water and no weeds I should be repaid with a good crop?  In just a few short months we will find out!