This year we have more flowers than we’ve ever done before, and I even did a little vegetable garden on the side. The wife wants to make salsa, so we brought home some Garden Salsa peppers and a couple Roma tomatoes from Nebraska. We planted a couple rows of carrots for our guinea pigs and a watermelon plant. We rounded it out with a few strawberry plants that we brought from Nebraska, and a few more that we transplanted. In short order, the dogs dug up just about everything, except a Roma and some of the strawberries. Well, we bought some more Romas and a pack of peppers, and figured the carrots were all but lost. Then my dad dropped off some cherry tomatoes. And I put up a fence to keep the dogs out.

After about a month, the garden was in full swing, but one thing seemed to stick out above all the rest. The Roma from Grandy’s Greenhouse (my father-in-law owns it) was consistently twice the height of the ones we bought locally. The were all planted within two or three days of each other.

We’ve had a few strawberries and twenty or so cherry tomatoes already, but the Romas finally were ripe enough to pick tonight. A few of the carrots (six or seven) actually survived the dogs, and I pulled a couple of those as well.

And now, the main event… Most of the flowers we planted were from my father-in-law’s greenhouse. We brought back over eight hundred plants plants, most of them were in seed trays still, and were the castaways. We put them on shelving units with wheels (should have taken pictures, maybe next year) so that we could put them in the storage unit at night, since it was below freezing many nights.

We finally put them in the ground (and some in pots) in mid-May. The first pictures we have are from mid-June, and parts of the garden seemed to be stunted in their growth.

Boy have we been surprised this month. Most everything just took off, particularly the parts that seemed like they wouldn’t do very well. So I took a bunch more pictures for your enjoyment.