Gardening Progress: Raised Beds filled, X-Garden Trampled and Will it Grow?

It's officially, we've got a raised bed garden in the backyard! We did prep work a couple of weeks ago, and this last weekend we purchased soil and plants. Check it out:

The trickiest part? Dealing with Home Depot! It actually took visiting two Home Depot's to get this job done, the first one was so mobbed that they just left Shira and Dawn standing there, waiting for a sales person to bring out the soil they requested. After 30 minutes of standing around, they abandoned ship and headed for a new Home Depot. Amazing.

Right now we've got a handful of tomato plants planted, but the rest of the beds should be filled soon. They really do look official. (Well done ladies!)

Alas, all isn't perfect in Gardening land. Something, or someone trampled our X-Garden pretty badly. Many of the tiny sprouts were apparently lost in the commotion. It's odd, the damage happened between 8am and 3pm on Saturday, which means whatever did the rummaging through the garden wasn't nocturnal. My current bet is that Kidieous Nextdoricus is to blame.

Still, the point of the X-Garden is to learn, and so to that end I ordered 50 feet of 1 inch chicken wire, with the hope of setting up a barrier strong enough to to ward off future invasions. Let's see how that goes.

While we lost some good plants, there's still signs of life among the wreckage:

And I suppose the lesson isn't lost on me: as astonishing as watching life bloom from a seed is, it's equally as fragile.

I figured the best way to cheer myself up about the X-Garden mishap was to run a few more gardening experiments. I give you, Will It Grow? Our subjects:

That's a sweet potato, some peppers and Quinoa. For the sweet potato, I lopped off the part that was starting to grow and dropped that in the dirt. For the peppers, I ate the yummy part and discarded the end, with seeds, into the ground. And for the quinoa, I simply sprinkled that into a shallow trough. The idea for using store bought Quinoa was one I first heard about here. So while it seems absurd, it's actually not without precedent.

So, will any of this grow? Who the heck knows (actually, you probably know). I'm just glad to be mucking around in the dirt learning stuff.