How does your garden grow?

Disclaimer: This is not a baby pictures post, but don't worry more will be posted soon enough. This note is a big thank you to my Grandma and Grandpa Mortensen and our friends, Vince and Tamara, for inspiring and teaching us to grow our own vegetable garden.

Until my friend, Vince, showed me that passion fruit could be grown in Santa Barbara I never would have thought I would come anywhere near a garden. But Vince is very persuasive, and the passion fruit from his organic garden (where he worked until recently) was very tasty, so I guess that was the moment when things changed (I guess, if you will, you could say that was where the seed was planted... I mean c'mon it's a note about gardening). I don't know what changed exactly but it started small. I started remembering to water the few plants we had. Then we started acquiring more plants. Then Viv was giving me things like hoses and shovels for my birthday. Before I knew it I was harvesting passion fruit and tomatoes growing on our backyard porch. Well, this year we decided (actually I decided) to jump in with both feet, and we requested a plot of land in the "family housing community garden".

Well, the pictures below pretty much tell the story but as a quick summary we planted 7 types of tomatoes, 7 types of peppers, yellow squash, and zucchini. We started the seeds in February, transplanted in late March, and started getting produce in May. Viv was pregnant through all of this but was still a good sport, helping me move dirt, lay down drip line, etc.

Lately we're getting baskets full of stuff every few days, and surprisingly very little appears to have been stolen. I haven't quite figured out what went wrong with the peppers, but other than that we've been getting more than we know what to do with. I've never been so excited to eat steamed vegetables in my life. All I can think to say is thanks Vince & Tamara and Grandma & Grandpa for showing me how real gardens grow.