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Like a kid asking if it’s Christmas yet over and over again, I’ve been running out to my garden every day for the last week, hoping to see a few plants sprouting up. I planted dino kale, winter lettuce, and rainbow chard 11 days ago and was starting to worry that my haphazard gardening system (if you can call it a system) was going to fail straight from the get-go.

You cannot imagine my joy at seeing little greens shooting up from all 3 rows. The dino kale has quite a few plants growing – a couple look like they are already an inch tall. The lettuce has about half a dozen sprouts, and I found just one chard sprout starting to grow.

After planting the seeds, as discussed in my last post, all I had to do to get the plants to this point was (1) water the garden regularly and evenly and (2) chase my cat out of the garden so he wouldn’t use it as a litter box. Most times, both (1) and (2) happened simoultaniously.

My camera doesn’t take very good closeups so there is a somewhat blurry picture of a few of the kale sprouts.

I made a commitment at the beginning of the year that I would plant a garden before the year ended. Here it is October and all I had was a big sheet of black plastic covering a big chunk of my back yard. I put it down in January to kill the weeds, thinking I’d have a thriving garden a few months later, but never got farther than pick axing some of the area to break up the dirt.

Yesterday, I called over to my favorite local gardening supply store and asked if there was anything at all I could still plant this late in the year here in Asheville. Lucky for me, they listed off a few of my favorite leafy green vegetables! They sent me away with 3 packets of seeds, a small box of fertilize, and some frost cover for the nights when it may drop below freezing.

To get the soil ready, I broke it up just a little more with a pick ax, mixed in a cup of the fertilizer and just over half a bag of “Nature’s Helper” (soil conditioner) I still had left over, and then mixed it all around and smoothed it out with a metal rake. I planted one row of seeds each of dino kale, winter lettuce, and rainbow chard.

To prevent my dog from turning into a nice cool, messy dog bed (and hopefully discouraging the cats from turning into a litter box), I picked up 30 ft. of garden fencing to protect it.

And so there you have it – I now officially have a garden. Smaller than I had envisioned but it’s a start! We’ll see in a few weeks how well it works out.