Garden Helpers

This year in our new house I started a garden.    In Eau Claire there was such an amazing farmers market and we had so much shade in our yard I never tried too hard to make a garden.   Down here I am glad we have been able to get fresh vegetables from the backyard daily.   

This spring I invested in 10 bags of topsoil and 10 bags of compost with manure and started a raised bed garden.  This first step of mixing the soil and compost was by far the best step for both the girls.   And it really helped Jason and me out to have two human mixers rolling around in the soil to mix it up.  Once again, we were too busy working and being dirty to grab a camera so you just need to envision head to toe dirt on the two helpers.

After dirt mixing came planting.  One helper stood out at this step and has pretty much been the star garden helper since then – Clara.   She has enjoyed the process greatly.  When planting, she added the fertilizer to each hole to give the plants their “vitamins”.   She made trips with me to Lowe’s to pick out the flowers for the whiskey barrel and she watched the early stages of the growing process closely.   While Clara would be helping me plant, Grace had other interests that would come from the garden – worms and bugs.   Digging in the dirt was great fun for Grace as all the worms in that rich dirt had a chance to be exposed and examined.   She really has loved anything creepy and crawly and her first instinct is to go pick up a crawling thing the moment she sees it.

Both girls loved watering!   An excuse to play with the hose and get things wet.   Occasionally the watering of the garden would turn into just spraying each sister with water – but they both enjoyed it and no harm there.

Now it is time to harvest.   Like many other projects involving kids under 6, the garden has lost some of its luster.   Occasionally it is fun to pick the ripe cherry tomatoes and eat them right away but only Mom seems to enjoy hunting for cucumbers and zucchinis among the vines.   I remember back to the days of picking snap peas and beans on the farm and not really enjoying all that went into maintaining the huge garden we had then.  But now I realize it was valuable to see how things grow and eat what you have grown.  It’s a lesson I am glad to be sharing with my daughters.