Baby plants

After preparing the stock pond beds this spring, I planted my first seeds and starter plants. In one bed, I planted cucumbers and beans. The second was all strawberries. The third big one held Bradley County (Arkansas) tomatoes, eggplant, radishes, beets, and assorted peppers (red bell, orange bell, banana, and others).

I marked each plant and checked every day to see how they were doing. It is ridiculous how excited I was to see those first green shoots from the beets and radishes. I planted radishes not only because Joel loves them, but because I knew they were a fast (and therefore, satisfying) crop. I also planted squash in a big pot.

I made sure to mulch them well to hold moisture in and keep weeds out. It did not, however, do much to keep bugs away!

Vegetable Gardening for beginners

Browsing through a bookstore is a joy. I loved libraries as child; we had no bookstores in our rural Arkansas town. As soon as I became an adult, I started haunting both new and used bookstores, though my budget leaned more to the latter. Novels, poems, short stories, non-fiction - I loved it all.

During the past two decades, I've started spending a lot of time in gardening sections. A week or so ago, I was in a Beaumont bookstore looking for books to teach me how to be a vegetable gardener. I've planted the occasional tomato or onion, but never a "real" vegetable garden. That will change this fall. At the bookstore, I found two I liked: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegetable Gardening" (by daughter/father team Darla Price Bowman and Carl A. Price, Alpha, $16.95) and "The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book" by Barbara W. Ellis (Storey, $14.95)

The Idiot's Guide is an easy-to-read book on everything from planning to planting to pest control. The Veggie Gardener's Answer book is just what the sub-title says: solutions to every problem you'll ever face and answers to every question you'll ever ask. I'm betting I can come up with at least one problem not in the book, knowing a thing or two about problems (being a woman who once weedeated her calf). I also am known for asking questions, so it will be interesting to see if I run across some weird ones (also knowing a thing or two about weirdness).

I like both books and recommend them.