If there is one thing I’m good at, it’s jumping on a bandwagon and then not following through. Starting a vegetable garden seemed like a perfect outlet for this habit, which hasn’t had an agreeable place to settle since I took up – and dropped – pie-making (though whether this was a bandwagon is debatable, I suppose). But this particular garden happens to be in my parents’ backyard, so the helpful and frequent reminders (“Go harvest your beets, they’re turning to seed!”) have made it difficult to just ignore.

As it turns out, I would rather not ignore the garden. It’s fun! Mine is a manageable size, probably 5’ x 10’, with enough room for a few mini-plots of vegetables each season. I might have been a little lax with the first rotation: the beets and potatoes planted back in late winter were harvested just recently. It doesn’t get very cold out here, so I’ll gamely blame the beets’ slow maturity on our warm weather, not my forgetting to thin them out when they reached their little sprout stage. The potatoes, I think, were just keeping them company. Despite their tardiness, both were delicious:

We bought and planted the summer crop yesterday. If you’re new to gardening, or impatient, or both, I highly, highly recommend buying seedlings rather than seeds. Planting from seed is cheaper, harder, and it takes longer; if you like to feel smugly virtuous—and I do—this is a great way to do it. That being said: seedlings = instant garden! It looks pretty right away!

So this time I was an absentee plant mother, lobbing the kids off to the nanny during their touch-and-go formative years and now eagerly looking forward to beautiful bell peppers, jalepeno peppers, Anaheim peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant. I haven’t found a way around watering and weeding (my nails!), but I shouldn’t completely deny my inner martyr her fun.

Of course I started from scratch!