I have never been a gardener. In the past I've often killed innocent house plants. My maternal grandmother was a very good gardener -- her entire backyard was one giant garden, and I remember rose bushes and gravel paths around bushes that were big enough for me to hide behind.

Somehow I never absorbed this knowledge, but I have to play catch-up now because this house has come with various flower beds, bushes, hedges, and fruit bushes that need tending. And since we have a yard now, we decided we wanted to have a vegetable garden.

If I wanted to grow stuff this season, we had to start our garden yesterday. My friend Rick, a fairly experienced gardener, brought his rototiller down and we turned over a rectangle of grass that I could use as my new garden. I planted chocolate beauty bell peppers, squash, and watermelons. Rick also gave us a tomato plant (that also had spearmint and oregano growing in the pot), and we've already got a nearly ripe tomato on it.

We also discovered that we have two fruits growing in our yard: red currants and raspberries. The entire back row of the property is covered with raspberry bushes and when I went out to water the garden tonight I saw that they're already ripening. I picked a couple of the ripest off the vines and tasted them. Delicious!

The currant bush is growing by our back door and the berries are ripening very fast. We're lucky to have the bush because apparently it's now illegal to plant currants in Wisconsin since they have the chance of carrying some kind of disease that can affect other flora.

The only drawback to having all of this at our fingertips is that I have no freezer space to put it in in order to preserve it, and I've never done any canning before and have little space to actually do it (though plenty of space to store it in the basement). So I'm not sure how I'm going to handle preserving these yet. But I've already got recipes planned to use them.