For the past couple of years, I have wanted to plant a garden.

I helped garden as a kid.  My parents had a great vegetable garden, and for the most part I remember enjoying it.  Lots of cucumbers, potatoes and buckets and buckets of tomatoes that my parents would beg our neighbors to take.  And shelling peas?  Some of my favorite memories are summers shelling peas with my grandparents at the lakehouse.  There would be huge buckets of peas, and we’d sit around on the porch and talk, and shell, and shell and shell.

Christopher, however, doesn’t have those same warm and fuzzy memories about gardening.  He gardened a lot as a kid, and even into his teen years.  He has nightmares about picking prickly okra in the heat of the summers with his brother and father.  They would take their hard-earned labor and earn probably $30 for the day’s pickins’ at the Farmer’s Market.  He says that “No one wanted OUR okra.  It was too big.”  That’s because they didn’t pick it twice a day.

Apparently, the black dirt around here is good for growing  two things – okra and cotton.  So, needless to say, begging and pleading was not even going to change his mind.  He wanted NOTHING to do with a garden - at all.  Then I told him how good it was for the girls – a great science experiment, fun family time (that he would sorely be missing out on), and that by God I was going to go and rent a tiller and till up the land myself if I had to.   He said that it would be impossible to till this “rock hard concrete soil”, so he started watching a few videos on YouTube about creating a raised garden with store-bought soil, etc.  This had him convinced enough to make a trip to Lowe’s.  Woohoo!  I knew there was no turning back now!

(I forgot to mention that before all this, I had already brought home red onion bulbs and seeds for lettuce and spinach.)

The trip to Lowe’s was a success!  We bought cedar for two 6×4 boxes, and lots of bags of garden soil.  And, of course, some accessories – cute gloves, water buckets and scrapelers (as Little A calls them).

Here’s what we did…

We measured the wood.

We drilled and nailed.

We supervised.

We admired our garden box.

We got a few kisses for a job well done.

We played on the bags of soil.

We took the boxes to the north side of the house, and we dug.  And dug.  I wasn’t very good at it.  It was HARD!

Daddy was much better.

We saw lots of cool earthworms and yucky grub worms.  Yes, there is a difference!

We used our scrapelers to dig.

We used the level to make sure the box was level.  Baby C was testing how level the wagon was.

We scrapeled some more.

We added the soil, then we used strings to divide the garden into 24 squares, to make it easier to plant the veggies.  According to C, easier than rows.

We planted…onions, spinach and lettuce.

We watered, and then admired our first finished garden.

We can’t wait to see our harvest!

I love vegetables, so I think it will be so neat to eat what we’ve grown…without a trip to the grocery store.  The other garden box will be for the later veggies – the squash, cucumbers, zuccini, tomatoes and potatoes, hopefully.

And ironically, C is excited.  That same night we built our garden boxes, he was watching video after video about gardening, and he’s even ready for us to make our own compost!

You never know.  He might be ready to start pickling some okra before long.

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