The Fruits (and vegetables) of Our Labors

Let me preface this post by saying, we bought the COOLEST house in the ENTIRE world! When we first looked at the house last January - it's hard to believe it's been an entire year - we fell in love with the backyard. It's not huge, but it came equipped with an extended patio with a built-in grill, counter and sink.

In addition to the great grilling area, there was a tree in the backyard that was growing two, TWO, different kinds of fruit...on the same tree! WOW! When recounting this story to my family, they explained that this type of tree is called a cocktail tree and is actually a fairly normal occurrence - apparently they graft branches of one type of tree into another type of tree and it grows more than one fruit (who knew?).

Our cocktail tree grows grapefruit and tangerines. The tangerines aren't ripe yet, but we've been consuming grapefruit for the past month or two. I've never cracked up over grapefruit, but there's something about wanting a piece of fruit, going to my backyard to pick said piece of fruit and then walking inside to eat it. I now LOVE grapefruit! There was more grapefruit than we could possibly eat before it went bad, so we picked it all off of the tree yesterday and gave it away to family.

Grapefruit on our cocktail tree

We also have what we lovingly refer to as our lemon bush (because it looks more like a bush than a tree) that has yet to grow any fruit - hopefully we will have lemons next year - and a plum tree that has fruit in the summer.

I know you're asking yourself right now, "you mean their house has an extended patio, built-in grilling area, cocktail tree that grows TWO kinds of fruit, lemon bush and plum tree...how could it get any better?"

But wait, it can...There is also a built in planter box along the back fence, with shade already attached! Now, Wil and I are not gardeners by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, if you ask my family and friends, my thumb is not only not green, it is actually a shade of brownish-black. Aside from one plant I've had since my freshman year of college (yes Dani, I still have the cute little tree-plant you gave me for Christmas that year), I tend to kill just about any plant that finds its way into my care. However, we saw this lovely little garden box as a challenge and an experiment waiting to happen.

Our garden box - with shade!

In September, we mixed some potting soil stuff from Home Depot in with our garden box dirt and planted rows of seeds...we planted carrot seeds, pea seeds, spinach seeds, lettuce seeds and other seeds that I can't seem to remember. We were really smart when we did this, so we put a rock in the box at the beginning of each row of seeds, because we wanted to remember where we planted them. The only thing we didn't think of (duh!) was to figure out a way to show what we planted in each row. We currently have plants growing in our garden box, but we're not sure what they all are...also, we're not sure how we will know when the vegetables are ripe and ready to be picked (for instance, how do you know when carrotts that grow in the ground are ready, if you can't see them)...any suggestions?

We think this one is peas because the flowers seem to be turning into this...

Which sort of looks like a peapod...maybe?

I'm almost positive the plant on the right is lettuce...I have no idea what the plant on the left is...maybe green onions?

I'm thinking this is either spinach or carrots?

As you can see, there are also sevearl spots where we planted seeds that vegetables are not growing...either we haven't taken care of those seeds the way we should have, they were dud seeds and didn't grow or we thought they were a weed and accidentally picked them - oops!