My Gardening Journey

So it all began 5 years ago back in May of 2018 I went to a local nursery and bought my first succulent and it was a ruby heart succulent! ❤️

I ended up getting one that had a big ruby heart in the middle plus two baby ruby heart succulents on the sides of it. (Little did I know it at the time but those succulents were going to inspire me to try gardening a few years down the road!)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here they are 3 months later on August 10th 2018:

In the first half of 2019 I ended up needing to repot them because the original 3 ruby heart succulents kept having babies and they were crowding up their pots. Then on October 28th 2019 I had them out on the porch pretty late into the Fall and they ended up turning a beautiful pink color! 😍💗

It turns out that most succulents end up turning their most colorful when they are stressed out and in this case it was because of the colder temperatures.

I'm sad that they were stressed out but dang they are beautiful when they are! 😍

At some point a few months later I stumbled upon a blog where I learned that you can propagate succulent leaves to make more baby succulents. I was very intrigued and I wanted to try to do this so I asked my husband to help me find a growing tent so I could try growing a bunch of succulent babies. Being the super smart guy that he is he did a bunch of research and we ended up buying this grow tent in January of 2021.

Since I knew I was going to have a grow tent in a couple days I decided to try buying some succulent clippings on Etsy and I also decided to buy a "Mystery Succulent box" because who can pass that up, right?! 😂 I ended up with 12 solid succulent clippings and 6 bonus clippings and my mystery succulent ended up being a Zebra Haworthia succulent so that was awesome!

Then on February 5th 2021 after getting the grow tent all set up and functioning, I got really excited and decided to buy my first set of vegetable and herb seeds at Menards. I decided to go with some carrots, basil, sweet peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and strawberries.

Since I now had these succulent babies from Etsy that I needed to plant on February 6th I decided to go ahead and also pluck off a bunch of my succulent’s leaves to see if I would have any luck with propagating them. Then I laid them on top of some dirt and put them inside of the grow tent.

Then I laid them on top of some dirt and put them inside of the grow tent.

A few weeks later on February 28th I had my first baby succulent roots starting to grow from a succulent leaf! 😍

On March 7th I planted my first vegetable and herb seeds into 6-cell seed starting trays and then 2 days later I had my first seedlings sprout (they were basil) and they were so adorable! 😍

March 13th 2021 - How many pots of seeds I started out with:

March 23rd 2021 - How many pots of seeds I had 10 days later...! 😂 I ended up enjoying it way more than I thought I would so I ended up planting more seeds!

And naturally once I had the joy of seeing my first seeds sprout I wanted to try and grow even more different kinds of plants so I also ended up buying some ground cherry, cilantro and cucamelon seeds as well and planted them around May 20th.

Here are some pictures of my garden throughout the 2021 growing season:

March 25th 2021 vs May 20th 2021 - What a difference 2 months makes!!

May 15th 2021 - The first time my plants had ever been outside... they grow up so fast!😉

I ended up having so many plants that I needed to have them on our porch, on the side of our house and on the back of our house! 😂

(We live in an association so since they hire people to come mow all of the lawns in our neighborhood I'm not allowed to put any plants out in our yard)

Here are all the plants on 7/24/21:

All of the plants on our front porch

My 4 cherry tomato plants

My greenstalk vertical planter that has alpine strawberries, a ground cherry plant and some seeds for other plants that hadn't sprouted yet.

My cucamelon and cucumber plants

My other cucumber plants

And then here are all of the plants on 9/5/21:

All of the plants on our porch

A different view of all of the plants on our front porch 😂

The ground cherry plants

The ground cherry plants ended up being way bigger than I was expecting so they spent most of the 2nd half of the summer in this corner. Somehow they still managed to get enough light tucked away by our front door though so that was awesome!

My two over 6 feet tall broccoli plants!

I didn't get any broccoli from them since they ended up going to seed early due to the high heat but they still served 2 important purposes for my garden.

1. They managed to keep pests (mostly leaf miners) away from all of my other plants because the pests spent the whole summer on these two plants instead.

2. They had pretty yellow flowers that the bees loved so they helped attract pollinators to my garden 😊

The plants on the side and back of our house. (left to right) Cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers and cucamelons in the same pot, cherry tomatoes and another pot of bell peppers

It was fun to experiment with where the plants grew best around our house. Surprisingly the porch ended up doing the best in my opinion. I was worried the plants on the porch wouldn't get enough sun but I think the shade they got actually helped them not burn up during the high heat of the summer!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

And a post about gardening wouldn't be complete without some photos of the fruits, vegetables and herbs I harvested throughout the gardening season so here you go! 😁

Cherry baby hybrid tomatoes

Cucumbers, cherry tomatoes and bell peppers

My 1st harvest of my ground cherries, alpine strawberries and cucamelons 😊

My 1st harvest of my ground cherries, alpine strawberries and cucamelons 😊

Cucamelons, ground cherries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and a bell pepper

Yellow bell peppers, cucamelons and a little cucumber

Cherry tomatoes, green beans and cucamelons

Carrot tops, bell peppers, snow pea greens, lolla rossa leaf lettuce, strawberry spinach and mixed lettuce

And the last harvest of the year! Thankfully you can continue to ripen tomatoes and ground cherries inside when it gets to be too cold out at the end of the season.

Not bad for my first year of gardening! 😎👍 I'm so glad that I decided to try gardening back in 2021 because it really has been a lot of fun growing all these plants over the past 3 years and getting to enjoy the fruits of my labor (literally! 😂) harvesting all of the tasty fruits and vegetables I have grown each year! 😁❤️