I'm a gardening failure...

...or at least a gardening blogging brainstorming failure. My biggest gardening accomplishment this year has been cultivating a healthy, growing board on Pinterest called "Garden Ideas." Ha! Seriously, though, I actually made a conscious decision this time around to scale back my aspirations. Here's my list of excuses:

• I had wanted to do about 8 big hanging pots with vegetables and about 20 smaller potted herbs (imagining the flowing greenery blanketing my porch got me through many a dreary winter day!), but then we decided we were moving in May and trying to keep that many plants alive trucking across the county sounded like more fun than I had signed up for. 
• I discovered through talking to the locals that squirrels are notorious around here for devouring your hard-earned crops. People go to great lengths to build squirrel-proof hutches, nets, cages, what have you. Again, more fun than I had planned on...
• Here's the real kicker, though--I wanted (want) to garden first and foremost as a money-saving measure. The problem started when I crunched the numbers in early March and realized that, at least the first year, it would cost me at least twice as much to plant a vegetable garden as I would save in harvested produce, even when you factor in all the free stuff I was able to find or that people offered me (like composted potting soil & buckets for container gardening). Part of what throws off the cost ratio for me is the fact that St. Louis is the trading/selling hub for all the farms in rural Missouri and southern Illinois, so we can get super cheap, nice produce most months of the year. 

I still plan to make gardening a big part of my (future) home life, but after researching for several weeks, I determined that 2012 is just not the year to start any big-scale growing projects. Once we get our own permanent place (probably spring of 2015), I'll definitely start dreaming big again! In the meantime, I think I will try one happy little tomato plant this summer, just to get the feel for how things grow in Missouri and to get me in the habit of actually taking care of an outdoor plant. If it ends up on the sacrificial altar to the squirrel gods, so be it. 

Melissa, I'm so excited you're going to grow a few things! You'll definitely have to keep us updated on how everything goes! Everyone I've talked to says tomatoes are the way to go for easy-to-grow. Seems like the climate of the midwest is designed to grow just about anything, though...I feel like I live inside an enormous greenhouse.