Article: In My Garden

Created on: Monday, June 09, 2003

A Child's-Eye View One of my favorite things to do is help Mom and Dad plant the garden. Now that I'm old enough to take care of it and my little brother, Mom and Dad have given us our own part of the garden where we can plant anything we want. This year it's going to be beans and pepper plants, and snapdragons from seed. Dad makes me use my hand for a ruler to measure the distance between rows and the heights the plants grow from week to week. He also times my chores in the garden and doesn't make me weed for more than 15 minutes each week. My little brother still can't tell the weeds from the vegetables and flowers, so he doesn't have to weed. Instead, he helps me water the garden and that's fun, 'cause we both usually end up soaked! Mom helps us fertilize with her manure tea, but we think it's yucky and wish she'd just feed 'em vitamins like she makes us take. My brother tried giving his vitamins to a snapdragon, but it wouldn't keep its lips shut! But then he also thought the sunflower we planted last year was tall enough to touch the sun, so what does he know? Sometimes Dad lets us help in his garden where the squash and cukes and pumpkins grow. They're too big for our garden, but Dad lets us count the girl-squash blossoms and the boy-squash blossoms and lets us carve our names on the pumpkins as soon as we see one we like. It's fun to see our names on the pumpkins at Halloween. Mom gives us dip to take into the garden when we harvest our first veggies. Usually we gobble them all up before they get to the house! When she tells us we're too dirty to come in for supper, we pick her some flowers and she smiles right away. Once, when I was my little brother's age, I picked a bouquet from the neighbor's garden, roots and all! When Mom took me over to apologize to our neighbor, all she said was how nice it was that a child could see the beauty in flowers that so many grownups overlook. She winked at me, and we've been great friends ever since! I sure hope your summer garden is going to be as much fun as mine!