The "Fruit" of Our Labor

How exciting gardening has been! When we bought our little plants a few weeks ago, there was nothing close to anything edible on them. But as we have carefully watered and doted on our "babies" we have watched them thrive in their new home. We'd had our eye on one particular strawberry that seemed to be getting pretty darned big, and were pretty impressed with ourselves for successfully growing something. Then one day early last week, I was checking out the strawberries, and lo and behold found a giant one (at least compared to the others) that had been hiding from us down in the dirt. Over the following days it slowly started to turn red.

Every day as soon as we would get home, we'd go out to check on our strawberry, to see if it got "even more redder", as Joshua would say. Yesterday when we checked it out, it looked like it was ripe for the picking, so we went for it! Joshua got to do the honors of picking the strawberry.

What a delicious strawberry, and about as organic as you can get! Of course we all shared it, so we all just got a little taste, but man, there is nothing like tasting the fruit of all your labor!

Sadly, Copper has discovered the garden, and has gotten in there to sleep a couple times this week, which of course just about uprooted one of the plants. So we put a net over the garden to try to keep her out. That was successful, but unfortunately the plants, especially the tomatoes, were none too pleased about being covered, even though they were still getting full sunlight. While we were gone during the day one of the branches on the tomato plant that had about 10 buds on it shrivled up, and the other tomato plant started looking pretty sad. So we took the net off and are trying to come up with a new way to keep an old beagle out of the garden.

Can I just say, I heart gardening!