Gardening

Even though technically you can garden in Southern California year-round, I have found that it's best for me just to plant my garden once a year, since I run out of energy and enjoyment of it after the first round of planting and harvesting. So, since it's spring, Brian and I realized over the weekend that it's time for us to get planting. We went out on Saturday and cleaned up the half of the garden where our strawberry patch is...we let it go during the winter and it had spread all over the place. We transplanted the new strawberry plants back where the old ones died off, and made quite a nice little patch of strawberries...we've already got some berries in it! Cole loves playing out there and always brings me in a few green strawberries along with the red ones, despite the fact that we've taught him about this so much that he regularly recites, "Green strawberries are yucky. We gotta let 'em grow up in the garden. Red strawberries are yummy." Hopefully soon his knowledge will translate into his actions.

Anyway, we didn't clean up the second half of the garden because the dirt was too hard, so we watered it well on Saturday and this morning after I put Weston down for his nap, Cole and I headed out to weed and clean out the rest of it. As I plopped down in the middle of the weed patch and started yanking weeds out, I felt myself start to relax and breathe more deeply...there's something therapeutic about burying your hands in fragrant earth, and I can't think of many things more satisfying to me than feeling the root of a big weed give way and slip up out of the dirt. I love watching my weed patch become a dirt patch, all ready to be planted. It was one of the best mornings I've spent in quite awhile. Cole was enthralled by all the bugs...and let me tell you, there were A LOT of bugs. I'm pretty sure my garden wasn't this buggy before. I realized that there's a big difference between gardening in Utah and gardening in So. Cal. (lots of differences, actually). In Utah your gardening seasons are broken by winter, so your ground has been frozen and nothing is growing or living there. Here, the weather is so mild, that it appears that our garden patch was converted into not only a weed patch but a haven for little creatures...I've never seen so many potato bugs (not counting when you lift up a big rock) and I unearthed one huge ant hill that I know wasn't there before. It seemed like every time I pulled up a big weed, I'd unearth an entire little community of insects. Out would crawl earwigs, ladybugs, little baby spiders...I saw several worms and caterpillars and even a moth and a few slugs (yuck). After awhile I started to feel guilty when I realized how much I was messing up these poor creatures' habitats. Cole was obsessed especially with the potato bugs. He kept picking up one after another after another (I think he only actually squished one, he was being pretty gentle) and saying, "Momma, there's a potato bug! There's another one! There's another one!" This could go on for hours based on the number of the little guys running around. The best part of the whole morning though, came when I was trying to convince him that the potato bugs were tired and needed a nap (hoping this would help him leave them alone). He made a little spot in the dirt for the potato bug he was holding, put it down, and then proceeded to sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to the bug to help him go to sleep. These are the moments that remind me why I chose to be a mother and help me to love my job.

Later, after Weston woke up I brought him outside so that I could finish up my project out there. The last thing we needed to do was harvest our little carrot patch. Honestly, I'm surprised there was anything to harvest...Brian and my mom planted the carrots as well as some radishes out there right after Weston was born, so right at the end of August last year. Having a brand new baby, I made it clear to Brian that the carrots and radishes were his responsibility. I knew I wouldn't have it in me to do anything with the garden for awhile. He did an okay job keeping it watered for the first month or two, but then we both forgot about it, except for the one time that he asked me if I could go thin the carrots since he wasn't sure how to do it. Anyway, we've harvested a few now and then in the meantime, but I decided to pull them all out today since they've been in the ground for 7 months, and we need the space for new stuff. Here's our surprisingly plentiful carrot harvest:

You may wonder, when I said that we planted both carrots and radishes, why there is no plentiful radish harvest. Well, let's just say nobody needs a radish patch unless they're going to sell radishes. Brian ate a few of them (I'm not a fan) and the rest went to seed. We discovered that radish plants, when left to their own devices, grow really tall and get really strange-looking. Brian also discovered that they get spicier as they get older. I think the last radish he ate from the garden actually gave him a pretty bad stomachache. We pulled them all up too, but none of them were worth eating at this point.

Weston was getting a bit impatient for me to finish so we could go inside, so I pulled him up on my lap and handed him a little carrot in one hand and a carrot top in the other hand. For some reason, now there is an image saved in my mind of the beautiful sunlit garden, and my baby sitting on my lap, his little fist twitching back and forth waving the carrot top around. He was thrilled with his new toy, and I was reminded how much babies love discovering simple little things.

Cole loves eating our garden carrots, as you can see...


Even though Weston, as Cole says, "doesn't know how to eat carrots", he did enjoy some pureed baby food carrots for lunch. At least for one day of their lives, my kids have consumed enough Vitamin A.