We Really Should Have...

...read this book before we started gardening.

Three years ago we started this gardening venture.  Had we read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegetable Gardening, we may have been able to avoid being gardening idiots.

Alas.  We are still learning.

We pretty much figured out the potato thing the first year.  And the onions.  Those are fairly difficult to mess up.  The second year we decided we were genius lettuce growers since we discovered that planting it in stages is much smarter than planting it all at once. It has taken three years to realize that spinach just has.to.be.picked.early.  Earlier than you would think.

We have also grown peas each year, with some success.  Hot and dry weather the past two years was not helpful, but we still put some up in the freezer.

Since last gardening season, our family discovered a liking for sugar snap peas, which gave us the great idea of growing them ourselves.

Turns out that was mistake #1.

We had grown peas, so we assumed it worked exactly the same way.

Mistake #2.

We did not research for 1 second how to grow sugar snap peas.

Mistake #3.

We planted, watered, and watched them grow.

And grow.  And grow.  And grow.

I mentioned to my beloved husband that maybe we needed to put up some kind of support for the plants.  But we didn't.

Mistake #4.

We planted three rows.

We should have supported each row so it looked something like this.

But we didn't.

And ours can't be described any other way than "Welcome to the Jungle". They look like this.

Three rows have turned into one big pile of mess.  It takes everything in my being to muster up the courage to wade through the vines to pick these.  The fact that I can't even see the ground makes me about 99% sure that a snake may make an appearance at any moment.

And that would most definitely be the end of my gardening career.