Urban gardening

When Brandon and I first moved to Denver a year ago, there were four things that had to be available to us: an REI (thank goodness we put that one on the list, eh?), an IKEA (which opened next door to REI the same month we arrived), a Trader Joe's (my facebook demands have worked - 2 are coming next year!) and a community garden (I was anticipating being VERY poor).  The latter ended up being a whopping 1 block from our house in a popular DUG (denver urban garden) community, and we've had an interesting season learning how to grow our own food.

Both of Brandon's parents were here at the garden's inception and they helped us weed, amend and even plant our modest 11' x 20' plot. Around the same time I stumbled upon this awesome garden planning website which takes all the thinking out of companion planting, spacing, frost date reminders, harvesting how-to's, and succession planting (it's basically gardening for dummies).  Despite all these good intentions though, apparently you still have to water things to make them grow, and even more so when you live in the desert during a drought. Go figure.

OK, so we'll call this a learning year, but we haven't flopped out of the game completely. Our bok choy is abnormally resilient, one cherry tomato plant killed off the other five and is flourishing, and our peppers just won't stop growing with all this heat (anyone need some salsa?). We even have a couple eggplants pushing through, so not all is lost. In fact, I think we're ending on a high note - check out our most recent harvest!

Aren't the colors beautiful?

Peppers galore!

The resulting breakfast burrito

Our first harvest of lettuce earlier this season

Me and Brandon's mom prepping the plot for plants (say that 5 times fast)

I'll have to take a picture of what it looks like now. Watered or not, it's still an improvement!  Happy Gardening =)