Lessons From Our First Garden

There is something extremely satisfying about pulling carrots out of the dirt.

After three years of requests from my children, I finally gave in and decided to help my kids plant a garden. I’ve never grown anything before. I couldn’t even keep a windowsill basil plant alive. So obviously growing an entire garden was a super great idea. However, I figured that my kids were old enough to actually help out, and having our own food that we grew could be sort of fun. I was out of excuses. Time to grow something.

Way back in February, I began scouring Pinterest, buying gardening magazines, and scoping out how-to videos on YouTube. I wanted a raised garden bed with some kind of cover so the deer wouldn’t eat everything. So many decisions had to be made, from what kind of materials to use for the bed, to where to put the darn thing, and of course, what to plant. Seeds or starter plants? I figured we needed to be ready to plant around mid-March. Well, if you’ll recall, last year we had The Winter That Never Ended and it was still snowing in April. That just gave me extra time to plan! And change my mind! A lot!

Cute little plants in a cute little garden bed.
Sure, the half-finished cover doesn’t LOOK like it will be impossible to remove.

Eventually, decisions and plans were made. With the help of my husband and father-in-law, we built a gorgeous raised bed. It sits on the only sunny side of our house, close to the street, and doesn’t actually look as weird or out of place there as I thought it might. In the end, I think the location is top-notch (except now my husband wants to build a garage basically right where the garden is and that is a whole other story so DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THAT).

What was I saying? Oh yes. The garden.

In mid-April, the kids and I planted spinach and carrots from seed, and bought a cherry tomato plant, basil plants, and lavender plants. We also planted garlic cloves, but those didn’t survive  the Great Tomato Plant Disaster in June. (The tomato plant fell over while we were on vacation. It crushed the garlic. We managed to get the tomato plant properly supported but the garlic never recovered. The end.)

Finding our first ripe tomatoes!

I’m not going to go into all the details of how we took care of the plants themselves, because I still don’t know what I’m doing. But here are my main takeaways from our summer of gardening:

  1. If you’re going to grow things with your kids, don’t micromanage. I messed this up way early in the year, and got too controlling. The kids basically never wanted to help after the initial planting. Whoops.
  2. Find children’s versions of garden tools. I only purchased these very nice, very sharp, pruning shears that I could not in good conscience let my kids use. The label said they could cut through ¼-inch wood, which is awfully similar to the size of THEIR FINGERS. But back to point #1, the kids were discouraged from helping without proper tools they could use. Again, whoops.
  3. Let your kids choose what they want to grow. My kids kept wanting plants that I didn’t think we had room for (i.e. watermelon) and I said no. And while maybe we didn’t have room, I wish I had let them discover that for themselves and just saw what happened. (Are you sensing a theme with this list? Should have called it “Mistakes Megan Made.”)
  4. Harvesting vegetables takes some time. Many, many of our cherry tomatoes got overripe out there because we were too lazy/busy to go out and pick them.
  5. Related to #4, don’t build a garden cover that takes two people to lift off. I loved our little net cover at first, because I knew it was keeping the birds and deer away. But I couldn’t lift it over the tomato plant by myself, which meant I couldn’t harvest anything by myself. Hence, overripe tomatoes.
  6. Growing vegetables doesn’t necessarily mean your kids will eat those vegetables. I wrongly assumed that my kids would want to try this new kind of spinach because they had planted the seeds. Wrong. But also that spinach turned out to be weird and sort of slimy, which leads me to point #7…
  7. Not everything you grow will be worth eating. The carrots we grew from our 99¢ seed packet were pretty tiny and sort of bitter. I felt bad wasting them, but no one was enjoying them, grown-ups included.
  8. Basil is delicious and much easier to grow outdoors than in. Plus, pesto. Two very enthusiastic thumbs up.

The kids and I have already decided that next summer we want to grow a flower garden instead of a vegetable garden. And maybe throw in some basil for good measure.

Megan Langford
Megan lives in Lenexa with her husband, Andrew, and their two amazing kids, Milo (9) and Olive (7). After nearly a decade working full-time as an editor and writer, Megan decided to leave the corporate world to stay home with her kids. Four years in, and she’s still getting used to driving a minivan and being perpetually late. Megan is a big-time coffee drinker, ice cream lover, and book reader. She loves solving crossword puzzles, camping with her family, and enjoying KC’s local beers with her husband on perfect-patio-weather date nights. Together with her family, Megan can be found exploring the fantastic local parks and trails (they’ll be the ones in sun hats, constantly applying sunscreen), hitting up the zoo or Union Station, or attending one of the many kid-friendly festivals in the area.

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