Dad To 2: Call Me Farmer Eric!

It all started four years ago when my wife wanted a garden for her birthday. So my Father-in-Law and I obliged her and carved out two locations in my backyard for a 400 square foot garden, complete with fencing and stonework edges. We had a nice garden that year, and the next two after that, but last year we decided not to garden due to the excessive heat and drought conditions. Water was simply too scarce in our area!

Fast forward to this year. My youngest daughter wanted to give her mommy a nice present for her birthday, a couple of months after the fact and asked me and her Papa to "help" her with it.

So my Father-in-Law came over last week and tilled up the garden areas and this past Sunday he came over to the house to help finish up his part in our family garden. We started with returning the soil back to it's rightful place and placing the stones back into a straight line.

My Father-in-Law is somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to projects, so we used the twine to ensure the stones were straight and done correctly.

After the stones were in place, it was time to call my wife out and ask her "so what exactly do you want to plant anyway?"

I love my wife's deadpanned response. "The usual."

So my wife and youngest daughter, Morgan, drove off to the nursery and I set off to putting the fencing back up. I had taken it up and stored it after not planting last year. It made mowing much easier!

When the fencing was originally put up, my Father-in-Law did it so I wasn't sure how easy it would be. Turned out it wasn't that bad at all. Using a three pound sledge and a block of two by four, along with a normal 16 ounce hammer and a pair of pliers, I had the fence up in less than 30 minutes.

The hard part was keeping my little 20 pound helper out of the way. Annie, our long haired Dachshund, decided that this was the perfect opportunity to hunt and sniff out anything she could find. It was lizard and ground snake hunting season!

With the fencing up and ready, all I had to do was wait on my wife and daughter to come home with our plants. We figured that it would be too late to plant with seeds, so she was looking for healthy plants.

It only looked like she bought out the store. In reality it wasn't too bad.

We wound up planting the following:

Okra
Potatoes
Asparagus
Onions
Garlic
Peppers
Tomatoes
Two types of cucumbers
Four types of watermelons
Two types of strawberries
Crook Necked Squash
Zucchini

The hard part actually was trying to get Morgan to actually plant anything. It seems that she found the quartz rocks in the smaller section more interesting than actually planting. Go figure!

Once it was all said and done, we, well, I had planted all of the plants in the garden and started watering them. Normally it wouldn't, or shouldn't have taken me three hours to plant everything, but I decided to dig the holes, and fill the holes in with Miracle Grow soil, just to try and get a head start on a decent season. So it was dig, pull out Miracle Grow soil, fill the hole, plant the plant, cover with good soil topped with normal soil, making sure that I kept everything spaced as well as possible.

Afterwards it was admire the handiwork and water everything well. Have to give them tender loving care! Then it was time for a caffeine free Diet Dr. Pepper, Advil, and the Texas Ranger's game on TV.