Now that the new garden is really getting into the swing of things, I have to say, I’m liking it a lot better than the old garden. Note that this is very specific to me, because my reasons are rather selfish ones. I believe I have put them here before, but I’ll reiterate:

1. It is SO NICE having the garden across the street from our house. You’d be amazed at how much easier it is to keep up on it, even though it was only a few blocks away before.
2. A garden is much nicer than an abandoned lot.
3. We have met nice, friendly people. There were nice, friendly people at the old garden (some of the same nice, friendly people I might add), but for whatever reason, we never met them there. This is probably due to #1.
4. We only gardened at the old place for a couple of years, so we weren’t unduly attached to it, the way we might have been if we were there longer.

Certainly, the new garden is looking a lot better than the old garden site is looking right now:

I should mention that it is actually a lot worse than that; I took this picture some time ago, before all of the construction equipment and temporary construction trailers moved in.

The new garden, meanwhile, is looking pretty stellar. Our gnome, Lloyd, finally has a garden to keep watch over.

People always have all kinds of things in the garden, so we felt a little left out. I wanted to gnome to face inward, but Evie insisted that he face directly toward the plot that has a plastic shark, to keep an eye on it. A laser wouldn’t have made a straighter line from Lloyd’s eyes to that shark than Evie did when she positioned him.

We got our first strawberries of the year! Three strawberries were ripe all at the same time, so Sara, Evie and I all got to try them simultaneously. We’ve gotten a few strawberries since then, but not more than a handful. The strawberries are sending out runners like crazy though, and it’s clear we’ll have 5 times as many strawberry plants next year. It’s very clear that the strawberry box was necessary, as the plants have already made several attempts to escape its confinement.

I don’t know if we have green thumbs or what, but at first our tomatoes always seems like they are a little smaller than everyone else’s. Walking around I’m always like, “Whoah, look at this guy’s tomatoes!” But then at some point I take another look and realize that ours are now as big or bigger than everyone else in the garden. I don’t know if there’s something we do particularly right, the variety of tomatoes we have, or what, but they look extremely large.

We didn’t plant quite as much this year, so there’s nothing that we’ve really been able to harvest yet, but I am already looking forward to some delicious veggies!