And the rain came down....

I have admired our little basket garden all week long. Every day I would find a new flower on the strawberry plant. Tomato plants were getting bigger by the hour, while our squash plants were becoming stronger. I never imagined that I would really care so much about our garden. Each morning before work, I would faithfully water the plants with hopes that when I come home they have grown an inch. Believe it or not I even worry about our plants and I am not kidding about it.

One Saturday morning on my way out to run errands the sky looked grey and gloomy. Any minute the storm would break loose and my garden would have plenty of free water to enjoy. I wondered how long should my plants stay out in the rain, but quickly dismissed the thought. When I returned home, it was raining so hard that I was very tempted to move all the baskets on our porch. After rationing for a few minutes I made a very difficult decision to leave the plants out in the rain. I figured that if I have planted them in the ground I wouldn’t have been able to just pull them out and take them home in order to protect them from the rain. Plus they needed to toughen up a little bit anyways.

I am sure my plants thought that my decision to let them toughen up was cruel, but they didn’t have much say so. The rain continued through the night and as soon as I got up in the morning I went to check on our garden. I felt horrible when I saw one bucket of squash overflowing with water and my squash plants were drowning in it. I had to get ready for church, but figured that I have some time to fix my drowning bucket. As I poured the dirt out, I couldn’t figure out why the bucket that I spent $7 on was not drowning properly. “I should not have rushed to buy this expensive bucket and instead I should have gotten one from the bakery department at the grocery store for free. Obviously they work much better than the store bought one”. As I lifted the bucket and looked under it, I realized that I forgot to punch the holes in it as the picture suggested. Ooops! I quickly grabbed scissors, refilled the bucket with fresh soil and doctored the squash plants for a few minutes. However, I was very proud of my other buckets that survived the storm and the squash plants looked healthy and tough.

Healthy and tough plants should equal plentiful crop, hopefully very soon. I can’t wait to harvest our first tomato. It will make the best tomato sandwich in the whole wide world. Oh, and the thought of baking oven fried squash is making my mouth water, not to mention my stomach growl. I am still trying to figure out what I am going to do with our first ripe strawberry. I will continue to share with you my success and failure of planting a basket garden. Stay tuned…