Frugal Fail: Gardening Edition

This isn't me, but the picture was so similar to what I attempted, I couldn't resist. 

I'm a bit of a procrastinator at the game of life.  I don't mean to be, but somehow I can't get anything done until the absolute last second.  Maybe it's genetic, my mom & sisters are the same way.  I've been planning to have a garden since we moved in to our house two years ago this August.  Last year it just didn't happen, but I still had high hopes, and would day dream about a lush garden often.  

Of course come fall, when good gardeners prepare their gardens, what did I do?  Why nothing of course.  Why would I do the most logical thing & prep our garden in the fall?   So come spring I decided to try to suffocate the grass that was planted in my prime garden spot.  I raked all of our leaves from the fall (why would we rake them up when they actually fell?), piled them on our garden spot, & tarped them down in hopes that the grass would suffocate & die.  After about two month the grass was close to dead,  so we uncovered it, mulched up the leaves & planned on tilling the soil.  The only problem is that it rained...for like two weeks, and we never were able to get the soil tilled.

Needless to say the grass had a lovely renaissance during our little monsoon season, and was nowhere near dead by the time it was finally dry enough to till.  Which brings me to today.  We went ahead & tilled the garden, hoping it would sufficiently tear up the grass (it didn't), but we HAD to get the seedlings in the ground, so I charged ahead.

I had been reading about using newspaper as an organic weed block, so I decided to try it.  I wet the sheets of paper, and lovingly layed them all out to cover the entirety of the garden.  The tedious process took the better part of two hours.  Then I got to planting.  It went rather well, & I had planted the majority of the garden when all of the sudden, we had a rather large gust of wind....and you guess it...in one fell swoop ALL of the papers went EVERYWHERE.  And I of course, embarrassed as heck, I scrambled all over after them, trying to pick them up before our neighbors thought we were real hillbillies.  It was so depressing.

Suffice it to say that I firmly believe that our little seedlings will be choked out by grass, and the ones that actually do survive will probably be eaten by Penelope, the neighborhood wild rabbit, her babies, & extended relatives.  Frustration thy name is gardening.