The Garden: Week One

In an effort to be always improving my blog, I've decided to start doing some regular features. I'll be introducing them over the next month, and am really excited to start with this one.

In case you're new to my blog: my fiancé and I recently bought our first house in December. We've never been homeowners before, so we've never had the chance to have our own yard or make big changes to the house. Aside from some fixing-up projects around the house, the one thing that I've been thrilled about is planting our own vegetable garden. Since we live in southern Idaho, way up in the mountains, we had to wait until the weekend after Memorial Day to even plant. Even then, Jordan had to cover up the garden at night for almost a week to prevent frost damage.

There is something so comforting and down-to-earth about growing our own food; it's been something I've looked forward to for a long time. Jordan, on the other hand, grew up on a ranch and his mom always had a fantastic vegetable garden. Obviously mine won't be that successful for quite a while, but as long as I get some produce from mine this year, I'll be more than happy.

So I wanted to share little peeks into our garden life each week. It will be a fun way for me to track the progress of our little plants. We've also put together a couple of DIYs that I'll share, like planning the layout of a garden and making your own custom pathways.

Here are a few of my gardening updates from the past couple of weeks, just to catch you up:
1. Our romaine and kale (we bought plants, not seeds) struggled for the first few weeks, but have grown exponentially since then! Good thing we like salads and juice.
2. Did you see those radishes? Jordan planted those seeds, and apparently he planted a lot of them. We have a whole row that spans the length of our garden.
3. I didn't photograph them because they were too sad-looking, but my bell peppers, jalapenos, and tomato plants are not doing well at all. I don't know if they accidentally got too cold one night or what, but I have no clue how to bring them back to life.
4. We have four strawberry plants and two have already grown one strawberry each! Of course, the berries were gone the next day, so I think we'll have to put up some netting to keep birds away.
5. We also planted cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, and assorted herbs. Nothing much has happened with any of them, except for my wildly-growing cilantro plant. I'll just have to start making more fish tacos to use it up. :)

Also, if you've got any gardening tips for me, I'm all ears! I may even feature my favorite suggestions/tips/tricks from each week in the following week's post. (Especially tell me how to grow tomatoes, because my poor little plants are just not loving life here.)