The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul. ~Alfred Austin
Do you have a garden? I’m a farm girl so having a vegetable garden has always felt like a necessity and not a choice. I can’t remember my family ever not having a garden from the time I was a little girl until now. Having your own vegetables for your table simply takes a little work, along with rain and sunshine.
When all the kids were still here at home, we raised a big garden. It was good to have shelves full of canned green beans and tomatoes, pickles, beets, baskets of potatoes and a freezer with corn, zucchini and various other vegetables in packages waiting for me to pull them out to cook. It’s still good to have those things but we don’t need nearly as many as we once did. So now we turn our garden plot over to our son and his family. Then we plant a few rows for ourselves. Some beans and a few cucumbers and tomatoes. They plant the rest of the rows with beans, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini and various other vegetables.
Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox
Our son is the one with the growing family to feed now. And we get the pleasure of watching not only the garden grow, but our grandkids too. Gardening for them is truly a family affair. Everybody gets in the act of planting and weeding and eventually harvesting and then cooking and eating the product of their labor. In the pictures from this year’s planting day, you can see that all three of his girls are barefoot as they set out the tomato plants.
While they do sometimes complain at bean picking time, they never 
complain about planting the seeds and plants. That’s the hopeful magic of gardening. You dig up the ground, plant, hope for rain to water the plants, do some weeding and wait for the reward for your labor. The picture on the left is what we hope the garden will look like soon and the one on the right with my sweet dog buddy, Oscar, from a few years ago shows the bounty the kids sometimes carry out of the garden.
Gardening is cheaper than therapy, and you get tomatoes. – Unknown
There’s not much better than a ripe tomato picked out of your garden. And at a certain age, a kid actually thinks it’s a treat to get to pick those tomatoes or cucumbers or whatever. Perhaps someday the kids will live where they can have a garden and their children will have the joy of walking walk barefoot in the dirt and getting some of that dirt under their fingernails as they set out tomato plants with their hands.
The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. – Gertrude Jekyll
To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. – Audrey Hepburn
Have you ever had a garden? Vegetables or flowers? Do you love digging in the dirt?
