Several months ago, Jason returned home from Lowe's with a garden box. He set it up in his back yard and filled it with dirt. Shortly after we ventured out to purchase plants. We settled on blackberries, jalapenos, squash, basil, strawberries, eggplant, and 2 different types of tomatoes to fit into this 4 by 4 garden box. Of course, being new at gardening, we didn't account for the fact that plants GROW. In the coming weeks the garden battles beetles, sun, drought and over crowding. We quickly had a strawberry and blackberry crop, which was over taken by slugs and beetles and then overshadowed by the enormous growth of the squash plant.
Today we have 18 healthy looking tomatoes on 1 of the tomato vines, 1 eggplant, a few sprouting peppers and a flourishing basil plant. The blackberries have come and gone. We never were able to get more than a few to put in our morning smoothies before dashing out the door for work. There have been discussing of adding a second garden box in the backyard, but the thoughts of mixing dirt with the carefully laid stones still lurks in the back of our minds. You see, the entire backyard has a tarp placed over the layer of earth to prevent weeds from frolicking in between the stones and creating an unsightly mess of the backyard. To us, this means the roots of the plants we chose will never venture further into the earth than the depth of the garden box.
With much delight, we found after a week long's trip to Ecuador that our garden had furnished a perfectly purple eggplant. The shape seemed a bit alarming at first, but it's heart shape seems to resemble the care that had been bestowed upon the 12 cubic feet of earth.
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