Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Last year when I decided to plant a garden for the first time I asked my mom for any suggestions or advise that she may have for me. She always grew a great vegetable garden while I was growing up which is no small task in Park City. She spent countless hours doing the typical things gardeners have to do such as weeding, tilling, planting and watering along with things most gardeners don't have to do like covering up the vegetables every night with a tarp and uncovering them every morning. Her tomatoes had to be very babied with their walls of water and the amount of time she spent taking care of the corn that only grew about 5 inches long would have produced lovely corn anywhere else. I figured she would have great advice for me but all she told me was "a garden is a learning process and you are just going to have to learn as you go." Well learn from my mistakes...make sure you get every last rotten tomato out of your garden at the end of the season. Never till them into your dirt and figure that it will provide nutrients for next years plants. That is what we did. We had a really early frost last year while we were out of town so we came home to three huge tomato plants dead with at least 100 ruined tomatoes on them. We just left them the way they were all winter and then Brad tilled them into the dirt. This is what that created:

About 500 tomato plants sprouting up everywhere!!! The ones on the side of the box are from the plants hunching over the box onto the pea gravel. All those plants you see are after we have gone through and weeded them out multiple times. I guess we gave up and this is what happened. It is hard for me to tell what I even planted in that box. I know there is some squash, peppers and eggplant but I think I may have picked the eggplant starts one of the times I weeded because I can't find them anymore. I decided I might as well leave the ones on the side of the box (although I may need to thin them out) because they are really healthy plants and they look like they have a lot of buds on them. I wonder how big they would have been if we didn't pick the first ones growing. The plants I bought this year on the other hand... are not looking so great. There is some fruit on them already but they are pretty scraggly and yellow.

My mother in law has also always had a wonderful garden and when she came to visit after Laela was born and learned that we tilled all the tomatoes into the dirt she warned us that this may happen. I wish we talked to her before we did it. I asked my mom if she knew this could happen and she had no clue. Probably because the winters are so harsh in Park City the seeds would get ruined plus I don't think we ever let a single tomato go to waste since they took so much work to produce. Oh well, I am still learning.

Some other unrelated news, thanks to my friend Kim, the girls watched some of E.T at her house and now they are terrified of "monsters" as Alex calls them. Ayden always corrects her and tells her that it is aliens she is afraid of. Anyway, getting them to go to bed hasn't been easy. It took about three hours of putting them back in there room reassuring them that there were no such thing as aliens let alone any in their room they finally fell asleep. But when I went in to check on them before I went to bed this is how I found them:

Ayden told me that they were too afraid of Aliens and had to cuddle so they could fall asleep. Thanks Kim!!! hehe