The Joy of a Garden

  

Some of my earliest childhood memories revolve around summer gardens.  I loved following my Mama around, "helping" her weed and tend the plants.  And of course, I always enjoyed the harvest.  I can remember eating apricots right off the trees in Logan, our family's first home, and pulling plump carrots out of the ground and eating them dirt and all in Jackson Milton.  Of course, following the harvest came home canning. Tomatoes and tomato sauce and peaches and applesauce, cooked up, canned up, then lined up in cold storage in the basement. 

 

I'm pretty sure we always planted our family garden around Memorial Day, which I remember mumbling about sometimes because it was everyone's day of and therefore, technically a vacation day, not a rototill-horse-manure and stick-seeds-in-the-ground-and-be-happy-about-it day.  But helping plant the garden taught me to work hard.  My Dad believes strongly in the Little Red Hen principle, and working in the garden brought the lessons of "reaping what you sow" and "being an active contributor" to life.

I've always looked forward to caring for my own family garden, and one of the things I was most excited about for the summer in Wisconsin was showing Sawyer where our food comes from, how we can grow and harvest it ourselves, and how it really is best with the dirt and bugs still on.  He's pretty "Blueberries for Sal" when it comes to picking raspberries (one for the bucket, two for me, one for the bucket, a whole handful for me....) but I don't mind one bit.  Someday I'll teach him about the importance of learning both to work hard for yourself and how to work to help your family, but for now, we'll just run through corn rows.