Deemer Family Blog: Garden

Just like every year, I decided to plant a garden this summer. Last year I tried lasagna gardening (sheet composting) and had some great success with it. It cut down on my weeding tremendously and despite the tomatoe blight everyone was hit with my plants did really well. So I decided to go with this method again. In the fall I had covered my beds with all the dried leaves I collected so I would have dry material to work with in the spring. When I moved the leaves in the spring I found three very healthy plants under them. Hmmm . . . Two of them really appeared to be peas and since I had planted peas last year and had a few dried pods that I'm sure fell I figured that's what they were. So I left the plants there as an experiment. After a few weeks the third mystery plant began to look more like a bigger mystery to me. I was thinking weed and was ready to pull it when the rabbits ate it. Probably not a weed after all. However the two "peas" kept growing and growing and soon were climbing and healthy. I figured any day now I'd get peas but nothing. Hmmm . . . Today I pulled a leaf and looked it up in my gardening book. I think it's actually a cucumber. I've never planted cucumbers!?! How the heck did it get there. My only thinking is maybe, just maybe, I was throwing kitchen scraps in my compost and some cucumber ended up in there. I don't know. I probably should have pulled it out when I found it back in the beginning of spring but I just couldn't help myself it was a mystery I wanted to find out. So as of now it's not hurting anything. I'm going to leave it there until it produces something.

Here's the mystery plant. See what you think.

Since Clara has been more interested in growing stuff I let her help me pick out some plants this year. In addition to my typical tomatoes, peppers and basil I've added zucchini, pumpkins, lettuce and carrots. The lettuce is doing fabulous and is basically ready to eat.