Planting our Vegetable Garden

We finally have some plants in this year's vegetable garden! Last year's didn't go so well - we started with only seeds (aside from a few tomato plants), and a couple of weeks after planting, we left on an almost two-week vacation in June. We came home to a garden full of weeds! Then we had a drought during the second half of the summer. So it was a bit hard to maintain. Needless to say, by the end of summer, we didn't have too many pickings mature enough to eat. We had some sweet corn and maybe a small watermelon. And I think the select few cucumbers and tomatoes.

This year we have vowed to keep our garden growing and are hoping for a better turnout! We decided to get several pre-grown plants this year, which we planted this week:

This section takes up only a little less than half of our whole garden space. The grass clippings are to keep it a little neater and to help control the weeds. I think I counted 12 "plants" that we picked up already growing. From left to right - a row of tomatoes, a row and a half of peppers, and some cucumbers. P.S. - See that garden directly behind ours? That's our neighbors' - they're an older couple, and they always have the neatest, cutest garden ever. It makes me jealous! Haha. Especially last year - ours was horrible in comparison.

For the rest of the garden area, we think we are going to plant seeds, and we've started with carrot seeds and watermelon. Here's Trent digging a row for the carrot seeds:

Then we made mounds for the watermelon seeds at the other end of the garden (our dirt was a little clumpy!):

We plan on filling the area in between the carrots and watermelon with some sweet corn and whatever other veggie seeds we decide to pick up! Along the side of the yard we currently have rhubarb and strawberries growing in. We plan on caging in the strawberries and hopefully creating a nice little strawberry patch that the squirrels can't get into!

And speaking of little critters.....

 This little robin sure liked our watermelon mounds.

He even found a worm for dinner :)