I hadn’t paid much attention to our garden over the last 3 months. And it showed. The weeds took over, the remaining herbs went wild over the cooler temperatures, and a single, random cauliflower plant popped up out of no where.

Which is weird because I tried (and failed) to grow cauliflower from seed. 8 months prior. In an entirely different box.

What didn’t fail? Growing grass in the garden boxes. We moved from a house where we couldn’t pay the grass to stay alive to a house that has the most invasive, hard to control, out of control grass ever. It completely overtook the pricey (worthless) weed barrier (“barrier”) and infiltrated all 4 garden boxes. So Jason and I spent half our weekend purposely trying to kill perfectly good alive grass.

It felt very wrong.

But then we busted out the tiller and got the last laugh… for a couple of days, anyway.

What I learned last year is that we’ll never, ever, eat as many salad greens as I like the idea of growing (I still have a ton of arugula pesto left in the freezer from last year). And as awesome as the zucchini explosion was, dealing with vine borers was not. So for now, we’ve decided no greens and no vine borer bait this year.

We’ve put in an entire box of strawberry plants and consolidated all of the herbs and onion-like things into a single box. The other two boxes have a variety of tomatoes, jalapeno, broccoli, green (and purple!) beans, and peas. And maybe we’ll stick a watermelon and cantaloupe vine in there somewhere.

Because throwing out a squirrel buffet without inviting the birds seems a little wrong.

One of the two peach trees have bloomed and little green leaves just started appearing on the plum tree. Most of the dwarf citrus trees are full of fragrant blossoms or clusters of fruit. Overnight, the fig tree unfurled several tiny leaves and the pomegranate has its first ever red flower bud. It’s a miracle that tree survived with me as its owner.

What are you planning to grow this year?