The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul. ~Alfred Austin
Do you have a garden? I’m a farm girl so having a vegetable garden has always felt like a necessity and not a choice. I can’t remember my family ever not having a garden from the time I was a little girl until now. Having your own vegetables for your table simply takes a little work, along with rain and sunshine.
When all the kids were still here at home, we raised a big garden. It was good to have shelves full of canned green beans and tomatoes, pickles, beets, baskets of potatoes and a freezer with corn, zucchini and various other vegetables in packages waiting for me to pull them out to cook. It’s still good to have those things but we don’t need nearly as many as we once did. So now we turn our garden plot over to our son and his family. Then we plant a few rows for ourselves. Some beans and a few cucumbers and tomatoes. They plant the rest of the rows with beans, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini and various other vegetables.
Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox
Our son is the one with the growing family to feed now. And we get the pleasure of watching not only the garden grow, but our grandkids too. Gardening for them is truly a family affair. Everybody gets in the act of planting and weeding and eventually harvesting and then cooking and eating the product of their labor. In the pictures from this year’s planting day, you can see that all three of his girls are barefoot as they set out the tomato plants.
While they do sometimes complain at bean picking time, they never 
complain about planting the seeds and plants. That’s the hopeful magic of gardening. You dig up the ground, plant, hope for rain to water the plants, do some weeding and wait for the reward for your labor. The picture on the left is what we hope the garden will look like soon and the one on the right with my sweet dog buddy, Oscar, from a few years ago shows the bounty the kids sometimes carry out of the garden.
Gardening is cheaper than therapy, and you get tomatoes. – Unknown
There’s not much better than a ripe tomato picked out of your garden. And at a certain age, a kid actually thinks it’s a treat to get to pick those tomatoes or cucumbers or whatever. Perhaps someday the kids will live where they can have a garden and their children will have the joy of walking walk barefoot in the dirt and getting some of that dirt under their fingernails as they set out tomato plants with their hands.
The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. – Gertrude Jekyll
To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. – Audrey Hepburn
Have you ever had a garden? Vegetables or flowers? Do you love digging in the dirt?
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We always had a huge garden when I was growing up. My Dad would plant potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, squash corn, cabbage, onions, green beans, and a few other things from time to time. Mom did a lot of canning and freezing in the summer. My brother and I were always there to help with the stringing and breaking of the beans, and I mostly helped with the corn. Now I just plant a few tomatoes and cucumbers to have fresh to eat in the summer, and will freeze any surplus tomatoes. Sometimes if I have a lot of cucumbers, I will make a few jars of pickles. I always have flowers in the summer. I love starting many flowers from seed to watch them develop and finally bloom, and I have several hanging baskets on my back deck. It takes watering everyday, but I do enjoy it.
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Connie, your garden when you were growing up sounds like mine and then the one we planted while my kids were younger. I had to finally give up on raising potatoes because I couldn’t get rid of the potato bugs. The last year I tried to grow them, the bugs ate the plants off as soon as they came through the ground. But I did love those new potatoes. We would raise sweet potatoes sometimes too. I need to get plants next year and raise them again. We’ve sort of given up on the melons too because of the raccoons. I could leave Frankie out there in the garden. He’d probably take care of the raccoons but he’d probably also take care of all the plants. 🙂
I don’t have a vegetable garden now that it’s just me at home, but I still plant the flowers, from seeds and from plants. I go to the local market and buy their fresh produce. Strawberries are finished, but they still have asparagus and rhubarb. Now the first squash, yellow and zucchini, are coming in and available.
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Fresh produce is the best, Birdie. I missed out on the local strawberries, Birdie. Stopped at one of the orchards a week or so ago and they were sold out. Nothing like home grown strawberries. So much better than what you get at the grocery. I’m ready for some home grown tomatoes.
Yes, I plant a garden and still can whatever the Lord blesses me with. What great memories you are making with your grandkids.
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We farm kids can’t give up that garden and canning, Lucy. It’s part of our springs, summers and falls.
Growing up there was never a garden. Mother did enjoy growing herbs in pots or outside in a small plot. Usually mint. She loved mint. One time she planted an avacado seed in a pot and grew a beautiful tree. I never remember helping. My husband always had a small garden after he graduated med school as he came from a farm family. The children helped, but I never did. I made the jams, jellies and froze the veggies. Our youngest, who will turn 42 on the 18th, loved helping. When he was about four he asked his daddy if they could plant some college (cottage) cheese. Obviously he loved cottage cheese and still does. Our gardening came to an end in 1984 when we moved to an airbase in AL where there was not room for a garden. Even though we moved back to our home after three years, there never was another garden. I guess the heat of South MS won out.
That is Karen “Jones”!!! Sorry
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I guess you helped by preserving those berries and fruit in jams and jellies and freezing the vegetables. Made their garden last, Karen. And sounds as though your kids may have enjoyed gardening, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cottage cheese plant. 🙂 And it is more fun to garden when the weather cooperates with just the right heat and perfect rain.
I’ve never grown herbs. Maybe I should change my little flowerbed into a herb garden.
If you do much cooking with herbs fresh ones do beat the dried ones. 😊
We have a garden .This year we are raising, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini squash and we always have Sunflowers on the back row.This year we put some marigolds flowers in the garden also.
I love fresh vegetables out of our own land.
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Those are some of the same things in our garden, Lisa. Except we don’t raise yellow squash. We’d like to do corn, but the last couple of years we only raised it for the raccoons who wait until the day before you pick the corn and on that night they bring all their friends and totally wipe out the corn crop.
We have that row of sunflowers and also plant zinnias and marigolds. Love my garden zinnias.
We live in the suburbs of Houston, TX , and don’t have a big yard. However, we have a patio garden behind our house where the plants get enough sunshine to flourish. We grow a couple of kinds of tomatoes, okra, Delicata squash (thin skin which can be eaten after cooked sufficiently), mint, and peaches and lemons/limes on trees. Some years we’ve planted peppers and eggplants. It is fun to grow a garden and exciting when the plant produces.
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I wouldn’t mind having a garden with peaches and lemon and limes in it. Here in Kentucky it’s hard to grow peaches since the spring blooms generally get frost at the wrong times. We did have a peach tree once. The only year it was loaded with peaches, we had a drought. Saddest thing watching those peaches sort of dry up on the branches. Sigh.
Sounds as if you’ve had fun with your patio garden, Suzanne. Nothing like home grown tomatoes.
Ann, that is something I miss terribly.We used to plant a large garden and canned about everything we took out of it. Loved our own tomato juice and my husband always did the juicing, the old fashioned way, to help me. I have pictures of us canning and they are a treasure because he passed four years ago, those were the good old days.
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I used to make a lot of tomato juice and canned tomatoes too, Donna. But then we quit having as many tomatoes and so I simply freeze our extras. They do great in soups. I think I’d miss having a garden too.
I’m glad you have your pictures and sweet memories of those good times with your husband.
I don’t plant a garden any more, but when the kids were little, we planted quite a few things. And some years my 2 youngest boys had their own little garden from seeds they’d started in plastic cups. One year, when Josh was about 4 yrs old, I found him sitting at the end of the row of tomato plants, salt shaker in hand…waiting for his ‘mators to be ripe enough to eat. I had earlier in the day told him it “won’t be much longer until they’re ripe.” He dearly loves his tomatoes!
Your grandkids are adorable! There’s nothing quite like growing your own food to help instill values. Farm life is the best!
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That’s the cutest story about your little boy and his salt shaker, Lavon. Sounds as though he was prepared. And he was right to be eager. There’s not much better than a tomato with the warmth of the sun still on it.
I agree that helping in the garden is good for my grandkids. Farm life is the best!!