Can you remember your first attempts at flower gardening?

I just remember the first time I tried planting it was when I was 15 and I just planted a lawn and a few small daisy. I actually was very difficult to dig holes, and fixed watering it. I honestly can not forget the first time.
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Oh goodness...4-H....had me thinking could do anything...lol....an attempt at growing tomatoes in sand proved fatal....but then I "gardened" with my grandma...so here I am!!!

 

It is this year now at age 34, I am giving it a go. Loving it all- fruit trees, veggies, and flowers. Dahlias are my new favorite! Looking to the vets for some help in my new venture!


( photo / image / picture from mshelenlu's Garden )






( photo / image / picture from mshelenlu's Garden )






( photo / image / picture from mshelenlu's Garden )

 

Good job, mshelenlu.

 

Thank you, Tina! How is your garden fairing this year?

 

I fell in love with Morning Glories as a child because I remembered having them at the house we lived at when my father passed away. They were so beautiful! I never tried to grow anything until recently however because I never thought that I could. My family always had gardens, and one day maybe I will move from the city so that I can have one too. Right now, I have some house plants, ferns, and some miniature roses. They seem to be doing alright and maybe my green thumb is not as brown as I thought. I want them to be doing better, but that is why I joined Garden Stew! I knew I would have to talk to others that are familiar with this in order to become better at it. I am happy to be here and am enjoying all your posts, stories, and pictures. Thanks!

 

There are so many interesting and fun stories, I've really enjoyed them. My first attempt was when my daughter was 2 1/2. I bought 1 6-pack of marigolds, dug a narrow bed along the sidewalk and planted and watered them. I then went in to start dinner and a neighbor boy knocked on the door and said Becky pulled all the flowers up. She had..and admitted it..every one of them and dropped them by the hole. After I explained why they had to stay in the ground, I made her help me replant them. Went back in the house and 5 minutes later another child knocked on the door. Same story. This time I swatted her butt and made her come inside. She never pulled up any more flowers but also has never been interested in gardening. Maybe that is why.

 

Gardening is new for me. The first flowers were portulaca I think. And that was when I was living in the apartment. The landlord had a couple of concrete culverts upturned and filled with dirt and I got involved in working with the plants in it.

 

I was about 5 or 6 and decided to grow a cherry tree from a pit. Nothing happened and I was really dissapointed. I thought it would grow immediately, like in the cartoons, but reality was different.

 

I guess I am on of the few that never did any gardening until I was married. My Mom who was a single Mom from 1958-1972 was pretty busy working full-time and raising us 3 kids. No welfare back in the 1950's. But she did plant a few annuals every summer in a little flower garden.
Once she got remarried in 1972 and could quite working. She blossomed into an avid flower gardener and bird feeding person as she now had the time and money.
My step-Grandparents use to have a huge garden. But us kids where never allowed in it. I guess they figured we would do more damage than good.
Oh well.
Now I love gardening. Both flower and veggie. Feeding and watching the birds is another delight I inherited from my Mom.

 

I don't actually remember when I started gardening. It is my wife who is more into it compared to me. She loves being in the garden.

 

I lived on a farm until my teen years and we always had a big garden. Vegetables and flowers. We grew enough vegetables to can them and use them all winter. The children's jobs were to pull the weeds and hoe around the plants without pulling the vegetables or hoeing them off at ground level. We usually did a good job. We raised corn, too, and walked the rows pulling off the ripe ears for canning. I think it must have been something we liked doing because we couldn't wait to get home after we started school again so we could gather stuff from the day. dooley

 

When I was around 10, my cousin and I planted sunflowers, and I planted chard. We both tried to grow the biggest sunflower, mine was taller, but my cousin´s had a larger flowerhead. Earlier experiences of gardening, at 7, I was paid by my grandad 1 ngwe for a small grasshopper and 3 ngwe for a big fat locust that I picked off the cabbages. Kwacha and ngwe are zambian money.

 

In first or second grade we sprouted bean seeds at school and potted the up in a paper cup and brought them home. I am sure I talked to it and named that bean plant. Sometime during the summer I dropped the cup and sadly our relationship ended with the little bean plant getting broken. Unfortunately I had no gardening family member to help me revive it.

 

This is the first part of how I got into gardening.
Grandad's Sweet peas

Uncle Joe had bought an old car and rebuilt it. During the summer he had offered to take my parents and me out for trips. It was supposed to be a treat for me as my sister Mary had gone away on holiday for a week with one of her friends.


The first and only journey that we made turned into a disaster. The weather was fine, warm and sunny, but not too hot. The car ran perfectly. The place we went to was beautiful. The disaster was me. I was travel sick. Not straight away, then we could have come home. No, I started when it was too late for that. I was not mildly ill either, but violently and frequently. Uncle Joe shook his head and said that he had never seen anyone dredging up his boots like that before, or ever wanted to again. While the car moved I was sick, when it stopped, I stopped. In stop and start fashion we finally arrived at our destination.


This was one of those large public gardens, I cannot remember its name or even in which town it was. There were swings and roundabouts, even an Ice Cream Kiosk. However it was not those entertainments that saved the day for me. In any case I was feeling far too delicate to go up and down and as for round and round, just the thought made me shudder. Even a promised ice-cream was turned down and as for the picnic lunch, I turned green. Joe said that it was the first time that he had ever seen me not eating, never mind turning down one of Mum's cakes.


What made the day for me were the flower beds. The houses at the top end of our road had small areas at the front. They were about three feet wide and as long as the house. Hordes of children playing in them stopped anything from growing except the tough old privet hedges that everyone had. Our local Park was really just grass and non-flowering evergreen shrubs. The town was too poor after the war to go in for fancy bedding out. So, I had never seen anything like those flowers.


Roses, petunias, snapdragons, pansies and hundreds more, hid the soil. There was even a clock made out of plants. I exhausted my adults dragging them over every inch of the place, demanding to know the name of every plant, determined not to miss one display." I don't know" became my mother's constant cry. Fortunately, a friendly gardener was able to name the delights for me.


It was only the memory of those flowers which kept me alive during the even more horrific journey home and the three days afterwards which it took me to recover from the motion sickness.


From then on, until a good hiding stopped me, I pestered my parents to move to a house with a garden. They tried to explain that they could not afford that kind of place and even if they could, the houses were just not available. There was a National Housing Shortage. The smacking drove my obsession underground, so to speak. I began to read every book on gardening and flowers in the Public Library. I took to cycling round the better-class areas looking at the gardens, until winter robbed them of interest. I dreamt of getting an allotment, but there was a hugely long waiting list.


To make matters worse my mother's sister and her husband moved into a new council house with a garden, front and rear. I heard Uncle Frank boasting that he was going to grow prize winning Sweet Peas like his father used to do before the War. That did it. By hook or by crook I had to have a garden.
More to follow if you want to read it.