Little sprouts

I have never been great about remembering to water things. Luckily my children early on learn how to cry for food and water, my plants have never lived long enough to develop such a skill, so most of the time they die by July. In our new house I have pledged this will be different (mainly because we now have a sprinkler system with a drip line-if only I could figure out how to get such a system to make dinner for the family...) So this year I have planted a little garden. I'm trying square foot gardening in raised beds. I started out by planting seeds inside. Very fun for the kids to see them sprout. We even did a little chart to track which ones sprouted first and predicted how high they would be.



Cute, but when I put them outside-they died. So I started over and planted seeds directly into the ground. They have been very S.L.O.W. in popping through the ground. But they are finally peeking through. We will see how well I can get these little plants to grow.



When I was poking around in the strawberries this morning, I found a special little crop growing.


I'm wondering if these little men





might have something to do with my slow growing seeds. It is nice to have kids to blame my black thumb on.

Along these lines, when we were at a gardening store Hudson really wanted a tomato plant, funny because 5 out of 5 of us in our house don't like tomatoes, but I went ahead and bought it for him. The bad news is that it is not looking so good. It really has me concerned because my friend Jenne has been reading a parenting book she loves called Growing Godly Tomatoes, it uses growing tomatoes as a metaphor for parenting. If I can't grow one little tomato plant.... tell me that is no reflection on my parenting. Go to her post about the book and comment for a chance to win the book. (Jenne, does linking to you post increase my chance of winning? Or at least my chance of borrowing yours? I'm making my list of books to read during fireworks.)