The Garden - and then there was green...

This is a post from my other blog about the garden I'm currently working on.  This weekend I'll take some more pictures because the plants are continuing to explode (but we're dealing with some casualties...tomatoes and cucumbers are proving difficult).  Happy reading:

I started a garden!  Well, I had some help.  And by help I mean the Canuck is sharing space in his yard, cut down trees, weeded, watered and got most of the seeds/seedlings we needed for the first round.  I think gardening is going to be a lifetime hobby for me.  As a biologist, I've never been squeamish about getting my hands dirty (which came in handy this week after an encounter with an animal infected with flesh eating bacteria...yeah....), and digging around in the dirt is something that makes the little kid in all of us smile.  I shall post updates of the garden as it grows because this will be a learning experience for me as well.  My family moved from an apartment to a townhouse so there was never much outdoor real estate to be had.  Plus my parents both came from large urban centers and their idea of a garden is the produce isle at the local market.  We had a communal garden plot for a year, and that was a lot of fun. A weathered old Spaniard named Nick helped us plant a garden full of pumpkin (we didn't grow a single pumpkin, even though every seed he handed us he called "pumpkin"...).  Unfortunately, we were not diligent in the upkeep of the garden, and I can only hope Nick is still there helping some other hapless suburbanite family plant another garden of "pumpkins."  Anyway, the garden began as a weedy pit of despair.  Then a month ago we weeded it, tilled it, shook our fists at it, and after enough blood, sweat, and tears were sacrificed to the garden gods, we had a bed that looked like this:

I apologize for the darkness...it was New Year's Eve and I had just remembered I should probably document this momentous event.  The gist of the picture is, it was nice clear soil with rocks demarcating the separate sections for plants.  All that was left of the Canuck's previous garden was an old rosemary bush.   Now, the garden looks like this:

It's alive!  Above we have Manoa lettuce, another kind of lettuce, kale, mint, chives, Thai basil, tomato, rosemary, tomato and lavender in the pot.  Here's the far end in more detail:

So that Thai basil plant there?  I've already cloned it, bwahaha!  Cloning animals has been an incredible and very recent achievement of zoological geneticists, but it turns out botanists have been doing it for millennia...who'd have thought?  All I had to do was snip off a branch from the basil plant, stick it in a cup of water, and a week later it had developed a new root system.   After the trials my sharks have given me, it's making botany look rather tempting...  Here is my new little basil plant between the pepper plants out back:

Yes, there is more garden!  And yes, it needs weeding...  Here we've got snow peas, squash, our high-tech scarecrow, my sad attempts at garlic, and potatoes:

Also, there are hot peppers, bell peppers, more tomatoes, cucumber, pumpkin (for real!), string beans, carrots and beets:

Let me tell you...carrots are very, very difficult to distinguish from the weeds that frequent the backyard.  I hope the carrots are what I left...  Here are some of the resulting pregnant plants!  A tomato (and a Canadian's attempt at using the macro setting):

Hot peppers!

Cucumber! Spiky little guy...

I could spend hours out there...