This past Saturday Samuel and I set to work on our garden. We’ve been planning and discussing it for awhile, even made a special trip to the nursery over Spring Break to get our seeds.
Growing a garden is a great science lesson for the kids. Seeing their food start as a seed in the spring, going through the stages of growth all summer, til they are ripe for the picking. Or in the fall watching the catepillars get fat from eating our parsley as they prepare to become butterflies. It’s the perfect classroom and I love hearing them talk about what they’ve learned and their memories from the previous year as we prepare for the coming growing season. I could go on and on! Bret has started saying lately he had no idea I had the makings of a farmer when he married me. :)
Back to the planting…
Last year we got all our seeds planted and neglected to make any markers for the rows making our garden a bit of a guessing game. This year we were on top of things and Samuel was in charge of writing them all out.
After the success of last year’s sunflowers we had to plant them again. This year we are growing sunflowers that will have edible seeds. If all the sunflowers that we planted actually take I think we may have enough seeds to start a small business selling them at baseball games.
And finally the pumpkins…
(don’t you love the face? Not really sure what that was about, guess he was really excited to plant them.) ;)
We’ve been warned about planting pumpkins. We’ve been told that they will take over the backyard, that we will have more than we know what to do with, the advice goes on and on. We planted them anyway. Why not? Some of the best memories I have from my childhood were from the year we planted pumpkins. Yes, they were everywhere, yes, they covered our picnic table and the entire spread of the garden, but it was so fun! I want my kids to have those same kinds of great memories. And if any of my neighbors are reading this…check in with us before buying any pumpkins this fall. We just may have some for you!
Now, if we can just get it to stop raining. I’m getting a little nervous that all our hard work and seeds might be washing away.
alison
PS–Recently read ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ by Barbara Kingsolver (author of the ‘Poisonwood Bible’) it is a great autobiographical/journalistic style book about how she and her family lived a year growing their own food (turkeys, cheese making) and buying everything else local. Even includes a few of their recipes. Definitely worth checking out!
photo courtesy of Wikipedia
