Gardening for the Fun of It

Now, I am not a homesteading-canning-food-growing Super Mom. And I am not a Queen of Frugality who gardens to save hundreds on the grocery bill. When I say "garden", rest assured I do not mean 100 square feet of neat weedless rows and trellises. I sometimes dream about all those things. But right now, the way I garden is for the kids, and it's for the sheer fun of putting seeds in the ground and finding out what grows from them. It's also nice to be able to wander outside and satisfy a snack-y feeling by opening up some pea pods or munching on just-picked corn.

Last year, everything grew in miniature. Two foot tall sunflowers and inch-long cukes. I was convinced that the lead paint that had been on the porches leached into the ground. We didn't eat any of it. This year our "garden" is a little L-shaped area that my mother hacked out in the back yard, prone to weed overgrowth and not very sunny. But things do grow. In May the bunnies enjoyed mom's strawberry plants very much. In June we had a few little pea plants which bravely straggled up their twine trellis and provided "candy peas" for the children to enjoy in between chasing each other. We rescued some smoothie-worthy raspberries from the earwigs. A few stunted little carrots grew, and became "magic" and the subject of a game of "Steal the Magic Carrot". Volunteer lettuce popped up and ended up in a salad one evening. Gebre threw some corn seeds into the ground in Spring and up came two scrawny corn plants. This evening we opened up one that looked ripe and found that its output was somewhat lacking but he did gnaw off the few plump, golden kernels he found and pronounced them "Yummy". He is very proud of those corn stalks. Biruk's bean plants thrived and grew large, lumpy green beans between the weeds. Even our viney plants grew, though they are a bit skinny. Our annual volunteer tomato plants popped up in a new location this season, and are looking promising. As I battled the overgrown grasses in the garden this evening, I noticed a few fuzzy baby watermelons beginning to grow. If we get just one to maturity without being gnawed on or covered in mildew, we will have a moment of sheer bliss when we pick it and split it open for immediate consumption.

This measly little garden has provided many moments of enjoyment throughout the summer, without actually needing a lot of work. Weeds grew, some of our seeds didn't. Nothing ever grew in great enough quantities to make more than a few nibbles. But that's OK because that wasn't our goal. We just wanted to see what would happen when we put seeds in the ground.