Gardening

When we lived in Baton Rouge, I worked at a garden store.  Most days I enjoyed my job there.  In working at a garden store, I learned there are basically three types of people.  There are people that work in their garden and know so much about what they are planting.  They love more than anything to get a little dirt under their fingernails, and rejoice in the fruits of their labor.  There are the people that have a guy that does their gardening.  They generally know little about plants, and just want their yard to be well manicured, but they are not about to get dirty doing it.  Then there is the final group of people who came in that knew absolutely nothing about plants.  They usually came in with problems, but they were difficult for anyone to help because they just say that they had a plant with problems.  They would neither know the type of plant nor be able to affectively describe the problem.

Right now, I feel like I fit a little bit into each of these categories.  We have a guy, Cesar who works hard to take care of our property, and when we asked him to dig up the weeds for a flowerbed, he has been so excited to plant something.  I so badly want to plant my flowers, make a veggie garden, and pot several fresh herbs.  I have visions of going to my garden and selecting the veggies we will eat from what I have taken the time to plant and watch grow, or snipping my own herbs instead of using dried ones from the supermarket.  I was always a little envious of the people that came into the store in the first category for being able to be outside working with their hands.  However, a few things keep holding me back from planting my own veggie garden.  1.) It is difficult to garden when I am away from the house all day with the kids at the children's home.  2.) It is supper time when we get home.  3.) I have a toddler that desperately wants time with just her mommy and daddy when we are at home and there are not another 24 kids fighting for attention.  4.) At 6 months pregnant, I don't know how wise it is to haul the dirt and rocks needed to build the garden.  I feel also much like a person in the third category that really knows nothing about plants.  I have never had a garden, and growing up we had grass, weeds, and trees.  The only gardening I did was weed pulling.  In my head I feel like I would love gardening, but something also tells me I may have a black thumb.

I am considering having Cesar build the area for a raised garden while we are in the States, and try to help plant the seeds when we get back.  If I do nothing with this garden, I don't feel it will be very rewarding to reap the fruits of it.  Help!  Give me advice on how you make your gardens grow!