I've always loved tending to plants. When I was 12 my father bought me a large assortment of plants and we built a small wooden planter at the base of hill by the lake and there my garden grew. It grew over with weeds, too, but I'll ignore that fact for now.

While in Germany I went back to the old German tradition of filling my window sills with plants of all kinds. I had one bush in particular that was my favorite. It sucked up about one and a half liters of water every day, but it bloomed with the prettiest pink flower year 'round.

Now that my husband and I live on the ground floor and have an outdoor living space we've both put seeds in the ground and have excitedly watched our seeds burst forth into lush, flourishing plants. I didn't actually get around to planting all the seeds that I intended to plant. The lettuce, carrots and a couple packets of flowers were left untouched.

The zinnias and poppies that I planted have yet to flower, but to the left you can see my climbers already in early bloom and madly climbing our trellis. Originally the dirt on top of those seeds got washed partially away and the sprouted seeds were exposed, I covered them up again but I wasn't sure if they were going to make it. Yet, as you can see, they have! I'm still crossing my fingers that my strawberry plants will bear more fruit than the 3 pathetic little danglers I had a month ago.

My husband's cacti seeds never came up. I think he neglected to keep the soil moist and warm enough for them to sprout. He did however plant jalapeno peppers that I believe will be bearing some spicy fruit before long. And going back to his roots of farming, he planted a mini corn field in our yard! We're both grew up in Michigan, a place where fresh corn on the cob in the summer and fall are a meal staple and much loved. I'm standing in front of the plants to demonstrate how tall they've grown. I was having a bad kind of day that only a 9-month pregnant woman in the summer can have, so please ignore the not so photogenic qualities of my pose. The ears on our corn are already developing, while my father-in-laws' stalks in Michigan are just barely knee-high. Up north we say if your stalks reach your knees by the 4th of July, you'll have a good fall harvest. Virginia is an awesome place to grown corn apparently because we have far surpassed the knee-high rule!