A garden tale

"Have you written about our garden yet?" my seven-year-old Joey asked me the other day after finding me typing away at my laptop. "No, I haven't," I told him. "But I should." I wrote about our garden before we even started it. Makes sense I'd write about it now, months after our seeds plunged into the ground.

As promised, my hubby John tilled up a portion of our back yard, and Joey had the pleasure of putting his collection of seeds deep in the dirt. We've got all sorts of peppers, pumpkin, watermelon, peas, and tomatoes. There's cucumber and strawberries too. Several of our plants are bearing fruit -- and vegetables. We've got a few green tomatoes, a few green peppers, and our cucumbers and pumpkin plants are flowering nicely. We can't wait for the day when we can actually pick and eat something we've grown. For now, we're just happy for the blessing our garden has bestowed upon us.

Our garden has inspired Joey to care for something. He checks his crop each morning, waters it late each afternoon (unless a plentiful rain falls down), walks visitors out back to see what he's growing, and offers the family a progress report each night at dinner. "Dad, did you see how big that green pepper is getting?" he has announced on several occasions. Our garden has also sparked lively conversations about how food from the Earth is healthy, how food from boxes and packages usually is not. Our garden attracts butterflies, it brightens up our yard, and it allows us to witness the wonder of nature. When it offers us food we can use to nourish our bodies, it will be one grand lesson for two little boys who are just learning about the world -- and for their parents too.