Garden Fresh Food

I think gardening is a great hands on lesson that teaches lots of skills and covers lots of subjects.  Watching a plant grow from a seed can teach a child many things (including patience) and really give them a sense of where the food they eat comes from.  Gess really enjoys helping her daddy plant, water, weed and basically tend the garden.  It's even more fun harvesting it. (Yep, I confess.  Daddy does most of the gardening around here.)

Personally I have never been big on gardening.  I always joked about having the ability to kill plants rather than grow them but I think that is more from neglect than an actual lack of skill.  Finally, after years of talking about trying to garden, we finally made our first attempt two years ago.  Yes, that's right.  I planted my very first garden at the age of 43.  That's pretty sad, isn't it?

Our first garden was pretty much a disaster and very little grew except for a few radishes, green beans (I think there were 7...not 7 plants, 7 actual beans), jalapeno peppers and one basil plant.  OK, so maybe there was something to that lack of skill thing after all.

Last year we finally had some success with our small back yard garden.  We ended up with several tomatoes, basil, cilantro, cayenne, habanero, and jalapenos peppers.  (My husband enjoys spicy foods, can you tell?) We tried but failed at growing watermelons, cantaloupe and broccoli.
This year we have been extremely busy and it's been very hot and the only things we have managed to get growing are our tomatoes, habanero, jalapenos and one squash plant.  We have actually eaten a couple of the squash already.  The tomatoes are still green, but we should be able to harvest them soon.  See.


Here's our tiny little garden plot.  You will see my tomatoes, the squash, oh and that stuff on the right is chocolate mint.  That grows wild, without any help from us.  It's really a shame that I do not like mint!


Thankfully we have people in our lives who actually do garden well.  Because of that we have already gotten to taste the goodness of fresh out of the ground, home grown vegetables.  My future daughter-in-law Chelsie took Gess (along with my son Tim) to gather some of those goodies from her aunt's garden.


However, Gess seemed more interested in digging for worms.


Gess didn't get too distracted though.  I know this because they let her keep everything she picked.  Check out what she harvested!


And just in time for Father's Day!  We planned a dinner using these as our sides and since our pastor gave us some plums off the tree at church we even made a pie for dessert.


 Our dinner was absolutely fresh and delicious!


There's nothing like eating, and experiencing garden fresh food!  Want to read more about summer gardening?  Then check out the Schoolhouse Review Blog Cruise where my other crew mates are sharing their summer gardening adventures, advice and experiences.


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Comments

That's just incredible that you're harvesting already! Up north of 60 here we're just now for the last week been able to eat baby spinach and baby romaine! My onions are like an inch across and I have ONE zucchini flower and a couple of bean flowers! Forget anything else! Haha! Sometimes I envy those living further south with better gardening climates.
Your tomatoes look good! :)
Jennifer said…
When Daddy does the gardening here it is so much better. We both planted gardens. His is still growing.
Julie said…
I understand about the peppers. We have way too much garden space used for many kinds of hot peppers every year. Lots of slicing and canning going on here.

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