Jardiland

Last weekend, Mike and I went to a huge garden center called Jardiland. Well, if you know anything about us, it’s that we’re complete suckers for a good garden, and that we have absolutely no concept of moderation when we get excited about something.

The whole store was beautiful.

They had orchids and pots in about every color you could imagine, as well as a number of other indoor plants. We picked up two carnivorous plants, like I showed you guys last week.

They had an indoor decorating center, with household knick-knacks and already had Christmas ornaments out! Our Christmas tree is being shipped to us, but we didn’t pack away any ornaments since we feared they might break in transit. Also, who doesn’t like a good excuse to buy awesome new ornaments?

They also had a very decent pet store area, and we found a comparable dog food to what we’re already feeding our dogs. We currently feed them Blue Buffalo (yeah, we snuck a 15lb bag of dog food in our luggage…what?) and they sell Nutro dog food at this store. It was about $100 a bag, but I think we’d rather pay that than have to deal with the dogs’…ahem…digestive distress…by feeding them a cheaper brand with corn in it.

And then…then, my friends…we got to the actual outdoor garden center, where we looked at things like this for over an hour:

I. Wanted. It.

It was 150 Euros and it was huge. We couldn’t have fit it in the car, but I wanted it, and told Mike that we COULD have it delivered. Instead, we opted to go with five smaller fruit trees!

We got: two clementine trees, one lemon tree, one lime tree, and one ornamental mandarin tree. We’re not supposed to really eat the mandarins on that last one, but we’ll just have to see about that

I was in heaven. Even though I was very disappointed that we probably won’t be in this house long enough to enjoy the literal fruits of this purchase, we bought them with the hope that we’d squeeze a few ounces of deliciousness off of those branches while we’re here.

After we picked out our fruit trees, we headed to the seed rack. My dad was sure to tell us to plant things in moderation when we told him about our huge area of land. Sorry Dad, we completely ignored you:

We have: Asparagus, brussels sprouts, spinach, corn, beets, turnips, onions, two kinds of garlic, leeks, carrots, basil, cilantro, cayenne peppers, green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, three other peppers that I can’t really identify, peas, watermelons, rosemary, thyme, pumpkins, zucchini, eggplants, cauliflower and broccoli.

Oh…and since they didn’t have many varieties of tomatoes at the store, we decided to just order our seeds for tomatoes online. So…add maybe 10 varieties of tomatoes? At least? Probably more, knowing us.

We went overboard. There’s no way that we’ll be able to consume everything we plant (assuming we even plant everything) but we’re gonna give it the good ole college try. Of course, it’s not really the time for us to plant much of anything, but since the temperatures here never really get to freezing, I think a certain amount of…experimentation might be in order?

We’re excited to see just how much we can do. We’ll probably be completely overwhelmed by everything, but you never know! We could be regular farmer Joe’s over here! I might even have to set up a little road-side stand by the time summer rolls around.

If you could plant anything in your backyard and have it produce fruit/vegetables, what would you plant?