How does your garden grow?

We started out well. Colin made more garden boxes (we now have one rectangle and 5 squares). I bought & planted some plants that are still alive (lavendar, blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes, peas, and raspberries). And we started a few seeds inside.

Then, duh, duh, duh...then things started going awry...

The boxes
The garden boxes look great - but they are still in the process of getting into position and getting dirt in them. It takes some digging up of existing stuff, leveling, non-rainy days, etc.

Number of garden boxes: 6 (1 existing)
Number installed: 3

The seeds
The seeds we started inside - well, about 1/4 didn't sprout and 1/3 (including those that didn't sprout) got all moldy - yuck! The ones that did sprout looked good, until they sat around too long waiting for the garden boxes to get installed and started leaning over and breaking. The ones that survived that, well, I stuck them into the garden boxes that had dirt in them, whereupon they promptly wilted and died.

Seeds started: 12
Seeds that will become food: 0.

The soil
While I examined these little sad corpses, we discovered these gel-like cubes of stuff all in the soil in the garden boxes. Turns out the soil we'd bought had these "moisture-absorbing crystals" in them; some chemical thingy that we're not sure we want to be growing food in that makes me think of disposable diapers (moisture-absorbing!). And now we need to remove that dirt and get food-ready soil.

Garden boxes with usable dirt in them: 1
Garden boxes with BAD dirt in them that now need to be emptied out: 2
Bags of bad dirt that had to be returned: 5

Summary:
Garden boxes growing food in them: 1

Sigh. So much for our new, improved, and larger garden. Maybe there's still time for this year. In any case, just think of how well set up we'll be next year...