Adventures in Gardening

I'm not planning on starting my big fancy vegetable garden until after we re-landscape the front and back yards next year but I still couldn't let the summer go by without planting anything, so I grew some tomatoes and basil in the ground plus some strawberries in a hanging basket and herbs in pots.

The experiment was mostly successful and I also learned some lessons for next year (for example, next year I will stake the tomatoes right when I plant them, not wait until they are already too tall to manage).

Eating things I've grown myself has delighted me since I first grew my own pumpkins in junior high, so you can imagine how excited I was to get those first tomatoes. But even more exciting has been seeing how enthusiastic Beatrice is about taking care of the plants. Every afternoon she asks to water them, to eat any ripe strawberries that appeared overnight, and to "harvest" the tomatoes. I have told her she can only pick the red, ripe tomatoes, not the green ones, so now she runs up and down the row shouting, "Only red! Only red!"

Five pounds of tomatoes waiting to be made into sauce

But perhaps Beatrice's favorite plant was the pumpkin she first planted at Toddler Treks using the classic seed-in-a-styrofoam-cup approach.

The other night Beatrice was in her pajamas listening to a story, ready for bed, when she suddenly sat straight up and said, "Water the pumpkin!" She was so concerned that she'd forgotten that I let her get out of bed and go water it before she went to sleep.

Unfortunately the pumpkin was under-fertilized and it never produced any fruit. But Beatrice loved this plant so much and she wished so hard and waited so long that finally after four months a pumpkin magically appeared! From the grocery store, where I bought it and left it in the pot for her to find.

She was absolutely thrilled and spent the rest of the day carrying the pumpkin around, talking about it, kissing it, and telling it "I love you!" Of course she also pretended to breastfeed the pumpkin, burped it, wrapped it in a blanket, and later offered it some snack crackers, so she may have something left to learn about the botanical sciences.


Oh well, next year we'll get pumpkins going for real . . .


The tomato plants grew as tall as I am