Let the germination begin!

Sunday afternoon rolled around and it dawned on us that we had gone two days without insane rain - brief showers, but not the rain of biblical proportions that we'd been used to. Our swampy little garden dried out a lot in the blazing hot Florida sun in just this short amount of time. Farmer B had the great idea to whip out the gas-powered tiller and till our swamp with the plan of mixing up the wet soil with the dry soil to end up with something plant-worthy. He got this idea after my little panic attack yesterday afternoon. I saw the seedlings we purchased and went into panic mode because they were already wilting and drooping after being in our possession for a mere two days. Yes, our black thumbs act just that quickly on living things. We decided to take the plunge and plant the garden while the littlest and most destructive gardener was napping, which also happened to coincide with the hottest part of the day. We're great planners that way.

Once the tilling was complete we excitedly hopped into the garden with the packets of seeds and the wilting seedlings and with so much gusto and excitement and we…came to a standstill. That's when we realized that neither of us really knew what to do next. We stared at the seeds in the packet - do we hoe the soil into rows? Make hills? Poke our finger in and make holes? Do we rake it first? Pat it down first? Then we stared at the seedlings - do we just dig a hole, bung it in and cover it up? The directions on the seed packets and on the plant tags were meant for people with gardening common sense - of which we have none. You know how in the directions for using a hair dryer it says not to use while sleeping and not to use while in the bath? And you think - what kind of idiot needs those instructions? Well we are the kind of people that need those instructions for plants. The tomato tags said to "plant deep" and that "80% of the plant should be covered." So were we really supposed to put the whole plant in the hole with just the top sticking out? That didn't seem right to us at all, so we planted just the soily bit in the hole with about an inch of the planty bit and left the rest above ground.

The best part was sewing the carrot seeds. Aidan was so intrigued with planting the pumpkin seeds that I thought it would be fun for him to compare the large size of the pumpkin seeds to the small size of the carrot seeds. One thing led to another and next thing I knew we were sprinkling a row of these insanely microscopic seeds into our first hoed row. Then Aidan went to look for the carrot row marker he made. That was when I realized that we didn't have a row marker for carrots because we aren't supposed to plant them until October. So we can list the carrot seeds as the first casualty. We may have a moment of silence for them when the time is right.

But seriously - we got the whole garden planted. From beH peppers to peanuts and pumpkins to zucchini . It's all in and now we just wait until it sprouts, it dies, or it gets eaten. Let's all pray to the gardening gods that it grows.