Day 19: Gardens are Great

Yeah, so if you’ve read my blog before, you probably noticed that I write about gardening a lot. Well, maybe not so much lately, because I’m a total slacker–I have blogs planned, I just need to squeeze them into my day. But anyway, some of my earliest memories are of my mom picking pease and beans in the garden in the Richfield house (you know these must be some of my earliest memories if I mention the Richfield house, because we moved out of it when I was starting preschool.). Oh, and the rubarb. I love rubarb. I can’t get it to start worth anything in my yard, but I’m going to try again, someday.

Anyway, I digress. my mom hasn’t always had a garden, but we did more years than not, even if it was just pease and tomatoes (There’s nothing like a home-grown tomato. I don’t care how much money hydroponic plants put into new, inovative systems, those winter tomatoes have no flavor.) I remember pretending I was Laura Ingalls Wilder and working in the garden as a kid. it was a bit of self-sufficiency even a kid could manage. She often grew a few flowers here and there, as well. I love flowers.

So when I got my own little patch of ground I just had to plant something. (We had the back trailer in a trailer park in Cedar City shortly after Bill and I married. The grass was smaller than the house, and the room for flowers/veggies was even less–and really only existed because we had the last trailer in the row). I put some flowers up front in the 4 or 5 square foot plot, half of which never even sprouted from the bulbs, and spent hours digging out back to create a mystical flower haven–if you pretended the cows weren’t lurking on the other side of the chain link fence.

I wanted what my mom had, a little bit of color and something tasty to add to my dinner.

Now I keep looking at my weed patch and wondering if I’m going to drag myself out there tomorrow to emulate my mom again–who has a great little garden going. She’s given me tomato plants and keeps reminding me to get the weeds cleared out and the veggies in. Her garden taunts me every time we go over. She’s still being a good example. =)