Fruits of Labor

My dear wife doesn’t exactly have a green thumb and neither do I. She once cared for a potted cactus and it died. How do you kill a cactus? It needs nearly no water at all. I don’t know, you’ll have to "consult" my wife on that. I can’t recall how many plants we had planted before that had ended up in the garbage bag.

I think it was last spring after we had thawed out from the bitter winter. One weekend while strolling down the garden center at a local hardware store when she spotted a few vibrant, potted flowers. Also found in the garden center were a good variety of fruits and vegetables. "Let’s have a veggie patch in our yard!" my wife said. Before that, we did have a few veggie planted in our yard. We didn’t grow anything fancy, just some easy-to-grow chili peppers. We had plenty of peppers to go around all last year.

There is plenty of land around our home to make a veggie garden, many of our neighbors do, too. Some of our neighbors have allocated quite a large area for different plants. We’ve seen tomato plants, cucumbers, squashes, sunflowers in our community. After a good 1/2 hour of selecting, my wife got the plant seeds she wanted to grow.

We got the potting soil, plant seeds, next was to figure out where to plant them. Different veggie plants have different requirements. Some like full sun, some like partial sun. The left side to our home seems to provide the best of both worlds. Full sun from morning until early afternoon then it becomes shaded. Normally I help out with planting, but this time, it was just my wife and our two boys.

They dug up a good portion of the ground alone the side yard. My boys helped their mom lay down potting soil and plant the seeds. More soil on top and plenty of water to give the seeds a kick start. After a few weeks we could see little green plants sprouting out the ground, Mother Nature has been working quietly.

Certain fruits and vegetables grow at a much faster rate, such as the little "pearl tomatoes". Once the little green tomatoes start to grow, it’s only a matter of days before they turn red and ripen. My wife planted 6 of them in all. It seemed like every other day of this past summer she was out picking tomatoes. My boys helped out sometimes. Surprisingly, these little tomatoes are very sweet, juicy and plump. Other plants, such as the spaghetti squashes, Japanese eggplants, bell peppers all started to balloon, too. Literally, all the plants were growing right before our eyes.

Gardening is actually a very good family activity. Our sons learned not only how the plants grow, but also the true meaning of "the fruits of labor". We enjoyed many delicious dishes with ingredients right from our yard. The lunch salads, BBQ’d bell peppers, eggplants. Some labor of love and TLC from Mother Nature really do go a long, long way! Let’s not forget the episode where I battled "Jack the Rabbit" which lived under our deck. I was quite sure it made itself home because of all the fruits and vegetables we had.

tomatoes spaghetti squashes

bell peppers Japanese eggplants

original post date: October 5, 2009