I got a composter for my birthday and spent all spring diligently turning my compost pile, even adding 40 worms to help the process along. I spent the past 5 weekends (along with Lance) tilling up a new garden plot, spreading compost, planting seeds and sproutlings and watering by hand every other morning. To go the extra mile this year, we also bought a plot in our church's Community Garden and spent all last Sunday planting watermelon, tomatoes, peas, brussels sprouts, etc.
I had high hopes.
On Saturday morning I carefully weeded and tended my little sprouts, thinking about the pictures I was going to take and post on my blog, as a contrast to last year's disaster. We had friends over for dinner and as the clouds rolled in they admired my spinach which was growing like gangbusters. We even decided that some of it was ready to eat.
Then, out of the blue, Denver got hit with a HUGE hailstorm. Our neighboring town got hit with baseball sized hail, but we were lucky and were only pelted with marbles. The hail didn't do any damage to homes or cars, but our garden was not so lucky. My spinach looks like a bag of shredded lettuce. You could literally see pieces flying as it got pummled by hail. My strawberries look like they got run over by a lawnmower and my tomatoes are just single sticks with no branches or leaves. I had planted zuccini and squash that morning that literally just disintigrated into nothing.
So, I am sad to report that Garden, Season #2 is closing down. We've decided not to invest any more money this season, considering our "cost per fruit" was already rivaling the cost of diamonds.
chopped spinach
petunia plant, minus the petunias
mowed-off strawberries
tomato stick
my biggest tomato plant. do you think it will grow without a SINGLE leaf?
Oh, hilarious. Loved the chopped spinach. Could just picture the hail coming down and pieces of spinach flying around like in a food processor. Too funny!
ReplyDelete