So, now we’ve just tilled up the yard…..so what to plant?!? We were already starting pretty late on this whole garden thing so we needed to get on the ball and buy some seeds and get planting.  We bought various seeds from Tractor Supply, Walmart, Lowes, and Dollar General.

We were out in town and thought we’d run by Lowes and Walmart and pick up some seeds.  These were not our usual store locations, but we were already there and they were more convenient at the time. Let me tell you don’t even bother going to a Lowes or Walmart in a city.  Their selection is pitiful!  We had much better luck going to our usual rural Lowes and Walmart.

Man, everywhere had tons of different types of green beans.  We thought we wouldn’t do green beans because both of our Mama’s always keep us generously supplied with canned green beans.  So, we were thinking maybe some other kinds of beans.  I thought maybe we should try some October beans.  I knew from growing up they are about the same thing as pintos, but is what most people around here always had.  At least that’s how I recalled it…lol.  Well, we couldn’t find October beans or pinto beans anywhere.  We found some dragon tongue beans that look similar to a pinto but with some purplish stripes.  We were curious so bought them.

We also got onion seeds, carrot seeds, zucchini seeds, broccoli seeds, leaf lettuce seeds, white corn, and green and red sweet pepper seeds.  I really wanted crowder peas, but didn’t find them in any of those stores.  I love crowder peas!  Jon didn’t even know what they were.  So, then I made it my mission that I must find crowder peas.  I started looking online, but wow they were kind of expensive.  While I was debating ordering some online, I went to our local grocery store, Stokesdale Bi-Rite, for somethings and right there at the door was a rack with top-pick crowder peas! Jackpot!

But we still wanted some pintos.  Jon did some googling and found that we could probably take some store bought dry pintos from the grocery section and soak them in some water.  We did that for a day and were ready to go!

So, now I was satisfied with our seeds.  No, we didn’t have tomatoes.  To hear people’s reactions, apparently that is completely un-American or something!  None of us in our household eat just fresh tomatoes.  And well we really were not thinking about making our own salsa or anything yet.  So, why would we want to plant tomatoes?!?

So, in a matter of just a few days we just tilled up the yard and threw them seeds in the ground all except for the pepper seeds at the end of April!  After reading the pepper seed packet, we realized we should probably not have gotten seeds, but ummmm yeah we had them now so we planted them in some pots.  We could always move the pots in the house if it turned too cold before they were ready.

Just as we were finishing up, my oldest boy who is 19 swung by on his way back to college and was surprised at what we were doing.  He’s done a lot of farming with his Dad over the years and also took several years of horticulture in high school.  So, he walks over to our garden that we were just so proud of and kicks the ground a little with his boot and shakes his head.  He proceeds to tell  us that the ground isn’t tilled up deep enough and that we should have turned it a couple of times.  Then we’re telling him what all we’ve planted and he all but laughs at us for planting the pepper seeds this late in the season and said we should have bought pepper plants.  Then he realizes we planted onion seeds and shakes his head again as if we were just pitiful.  He of course tells us we should have gotten bulbs this late in the season and that if we wanted to plant onion seeds we should have done that back in February!

There’s nothing like having your bubble burst by your know-it-all 19 year old son!  Hmmm, we’ll be lucky if we get anything to grow at all.