Homegrown Satisfaction

A Image via Wikipediahome vegetable garden is so much work but gives a great deal of satisfaction as you see your plants grow. Nothing beats preparing part of a meal from ingredients you've nurtured along yourself. My property is not very large, about seventy-five feet by one hundred. That's enough room, though, to have a few good spots to plant a garden. The house faces north and on the west side, between the driveway and the house, is a great sunny spot for tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and cucumbers, some of the usual summer vegetables we grow at home in the Northeast U.S.

The photo here is not my garden, but looks just the same about one month into the season. Wooden stakes ready to hold up plants which would become many times their original size and loaded with heavy produce. Areas boxed off, each holding a different type of plant, and hoses hanging nearby for daily watering.

We didn't have a garden every year. Sometimes there was just too much else going on to get into it. There were a few good seasons though. Usually when the girls were small they helped plant in the beginning and pick in the end. Not surprisingly the in between work was left for me. They especially liked the picking part. They loved being sent out with a colander and returning it to me full of tomatoes.

For a couple of years, when my oldest daughter was a teenager she planted a vegetable garden herself and took care of it too. The earlier years of being a helper made an impression on her. She understood the satisfaction bringing something homegrown to the dinner table.

This spring I put in a few tomato plants in a small patch of the backyard. So far, they are doing nicely. When I planted them in May, I wondered if I would be here in August and September to harvest them or if new owners would be the beneficiaries of my work. As it stands now, I'll be enjoying it all myself.