I feel like a post without pictures is a completely foreign idea now, but let’s face it, on this topic there isn’t much to photograph yet!

I have decided to become a farmer.

Okay, maybe farmer is an extreme word to describe what I have done in the backyard so let me elaborate. Alex and I are lucky enough to have a fairly large backyard this year and in an effort to alleviate my pet withdrawal, gardening seemed like an excellent solution. Caring for plants is almost like having a furry cuddly animal to sleep with at night right?

We started the year off by buying planters for the herb garden I’m starting. I brought seeds from home (probably a no no, but customs didn’t notice) and got right to work with basil, parsely, oregano, cilantro, rosemary, chives, and thyme. My basil is growing like a weed and my cilantro and parsely are doing fairly well too. Chives are just confusing me…I can’t tell what’s a weed and what’s a chive and am therefor having trouble figuring out what to leave in the ground! For now I figure I’ll let everything grow and see what sprouts purple flowers.

I had so much fun planting my herb garden that I decided not to stop there. I’m sure that this was in no way related to my love of shopping at hardware stores and the joy of needing to go to Ace Femosa every single week. Ace has a whole bin of seed packets so I picked up some veggies with the intention of growing actual food instead of just leaves! Digging up the vine-like grass we have in the background was quite the task and left me with several severe blisters and aching muscles, but now I have a whole strip of freshly planted land along the side of our apartment. In approximately 70-75 days I should have green peppers, carrots, green beans, scallions, 2 types of tomatoes, 2 types of jalepeños, and habañeros!

I am very aware that not everything will grow here and am interested to see what I actually end up with. For now though, despite Alex’s hysterical laughing at me, I highly enjoy running home from school to get out my new garden hose and water my dirt!

As soon as there are some actual plants sticking out of the ground I will be sure to take pictures and post them on here!