March--April--May

I'm going to be lazy and do three months in one post.

For March: Gardening.
Well, I'm still renting and don't have a place to garden but someday I do plan to have a garden! Mostly a flower garden. I love flowers and they seem a little less intimidating than food. I have no idea what food I would grow. I think it'd be fun to have a couple fruit trees though! But definitely a colorful flower garden. :)

For April: Strengthening Personal Testimony
This one's hard, I think. I'm like Cathryn. It's really hard for me to make habits. I was really good at reading my scriptures and saying prayers every day and then it kind of broke when I got to college. I felt weird doing it in front of roommates and that carried into my marriage where I felt weird doing it in front Colin. I don't know where this self consciousness came from. Maybe I have a deep fear that I'd look self-righteous or that I would be doing it "wrong?" No clue.
Through many talks with Colin we decided that I pray daily better when he reminds me and we do it at the same time, so I've been getting a lot better at my own daily, personal prayers. Scripture study is trickier. I feel like it's also so much more important considering I'm in nursery and the only spiritual upliftment (it's a word now) is what I can get out of sacrament between dealing with my two girls. It's not exactly like I don't have the time to do it. Somehow I found the time to read 15 books in the last six weeks. It's just a matter of thinking to do it and then in that moment of thought actually doing it. I haven't gotten there yet. But I'm grateful to read your girls' words as a cross-country encouragement! I look up to you girls and it honestly helps to hear that I'm not alone in struggling to do it. I'll let you know how I do! I'm putting it out there so you can hold me to it. :)

For May--Good Food on a Budget
This is another category where I'm lame and useless. Being the poor med student family that we are we have been on food stamps for a couple years now and I don't remember how to be on a budget as we never spend the whole monthly allotment the government gives us. It's massive. We're actually going to use it to build a food storage soon! So, I'd love to hear what you girls have to say so I can file it away for two years from now when we no longer qualify for food stamps but still don't have a lot of money as we need to pay off loans. haha

My Garden

Today I planted my garden (well,  a few pots and some flowers).  Behold the evidence...

Flowers

Cherry Tomato

More Flowers

Strawberry

There are two of them.

I tried planting onions in water and it worked, but was moldy, so now I'm trying dirt.  Two of those pots are still empty, three have seeds.

Garden Update

No, I don't have a garden (it is border-line early for that), but now that I've moved, I bought a few pots (that's the kind of gardening around here, that or flowers).  I've decided to do a little of both.  I'm allowed to plant flowers in the ground around my apartment, but not vegetables, so I bought some snapdragons and petunias.  I think I'll plant them next week, if the weather is good enough.

I'm going to plant a tomato...kind still to be determined.

I'm going to plants some herbs too, in my kitchen...kind also to be determined.

I'm going to plant something else too, since I have a couple other pots.

I'm an aspiring gardener...meaning my vegetable plants grow leaves and if I'm lucky the fruit too.  I've never had herbs grow well enough to use them.  I've never even grown flowers before, so we'll see how this goes.  I'm not very good at this, but it's just so worth it to see something grow at all.

Pictures to exist someday.

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.

What's all ya'll's plans?

So it looks like it's March now.  Congratulations to March!

I don't know about you guys, but I love the idea of gardening.  Last year I had a little place behind our apartment for gardening.  It was super fun to have actual ground to plant in (that was a first for me...and a last for the time being).

So out of curiosity, who is planning on planting something (I say anything even just one pot of something counts as gardening).  How are you planning to do it?

I for one will be looking for ideas.  We should be moving in the next 3 weeks or so and then I'll see what room I have to work with.  I suspect I will be able to have a pot or two, maybe three.  Anybody know of things that produce a lot and grow well in pots.

I always try tomatoes, but I've never gotten more than 5 off of my plant(s).  They say they produce like crazy, I just must not know what I'm doing.

Mostly, I didn't have anything particular to say about gardening right now, but am definitely looking for ideas for small spaces and no yards.  Anybody have any?