by Laila Khan

Created on: August 12, 2008   Last Updated: September 21, 2008

My brother chose the house because it had a pool and a large yard. My parents liked the house, with its three bathrooms, three bedrooms, and fully furnished basement. At the age of seven, I was just glad that I would have my own room. Needless to say, we were all happy with the house.

It did have a few quirks, though. The previous owners were active hunters, and left the skulls and bones of animals around the house and the yard. Our dog often found these bones and would bring them into the house to chew on them. One thing, though, that my dad and I liked about the house was the area on one side of the yard that was perfect for a garden. Railroad ties had already been set out to create a large rectangular raised bed.

We didn't move into the house until July, and we had a lot of unpacking to do, so we decided to wait a year before starting our garden. We eyed the garden bed through the fall and winter, and descended upon it as soon as spring hit. We wanted to start with something that would be easy, as neither of us really knew much about planting a garden.

We wanted some nice herbs, so we planted some thyme and mint. This was our first mistake. We did not know that the mint would grow like a weed. The end of the garden that we had reserved for herbs was completely taken over by mint. The mint even overgrew the garden bed and started competing with the grass around it. The mint won. There was mint in an entire patch of the lawn, stopped only by the fence on one side and the pool on the other. This mistake, thankfully, was not too horrible. Every time the lawn was mowed, the yard smelled of mint. We learned many different ways to use the overabundance of mint, including mint tea, mint-seasoned salmon, and, in my brother's case, mint flavored ramen.

After planting the mint, we decided upon lettuce. Again, neither my dad nor I knew much about gardens or the plants that we were working with. As such, we planted all of the lettuce plants at once. We were very happy that they were growing so well, until we realized that, because all fifteen lettuce plants had been planted at the same time, we were going to end up with fifteen heads of lettuce in a period of a few days. We did a lot with lettuce that week. We had salads every night. Thankfully, my mom was good with salad. This mistake was also tolerable.

By far, our favorite crop was our tomatoes. We put more time and effort into the tomatoes than we did with the lettuce, thyme, or mint. We planted them evenly apart, so

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