Food and Gardens

when I lived in Chicago. There was a backyard in the place we were renting, and a marked-off empty spot that nobody was using for anything except weeds, so one spring I decided to try gardening. The weeds were waist-height in a lot of places, so they took forever to clear, but I managed it. Some of the things I planted did better than others. Peppers, tomatoes, radishes, carrots, green beans, and the herbs I planted all did really well. The green been vines were especially fun, as some of them grew to be over six feet tall. I couldn't even find sticks long enough for them to grow on sometimes; the vines would just reach the top and hang from there. The peas and spinach did well too, but I had to plant and harvest them early as the spinach grew faster than most of the veggies, and the pease would start to scorch by June. The corn did okay, but I didn't like it because it attracted bugs, and the pumpkin vines never produced anything but pretty flowers. Also, I tended to start slacking on the weeding by July, at which point the morning glories would start to take over a bit.

The really awesome garden though, was the one that belonged to the woman who lived next door to me. She had turned her entire yard into a big garden. Lettuce, beans, peas, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, a big cage full of squash vines, herbs. She usually had two or three types of each, too. Watching all the effort she put into was always really impressive, and by the time July and August started rolling around, she usually had more veggies than she knew what to do with.