A Weekend in the Dirt: Family Gardening and Life's Little Lessons

This weekend marked the annual rebirth of our family garden, a sprawling 20 by 60 feet plot that transforms our backyard into a vibrant table of greens, reds, yellows, and weeds! As my family and I toiled in the soil, planting everything from pumpkins to blueberries, I was reminded of the profound joys—and undeniable challenges—of cultivating our own food.

Our garden is ambitious, to say the least. It hosts a variety of vegetables and fruits: multiple types of pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi, peas, green beans, potatoes, onions, cucumbers, alongside berries like strawberries, blueberries, honeyberries, and raspberries. This year, we even added a cherry tree and two more apple trees, bringing our total to five young apple trees. Each planting season, as I survey the extensive array of crops, I can't help but laugh and ask myself, "Why do I commit to so much?"

Henry, at six years old, has nearly mastered the art of gardening. This weekend, he stepped out distances with his feet to ensure the plants were spaced correctly. With a focus that belied his age, he carefully removed plants and seeds from their packages, placed them into the dirt, and gently yet firmly packed the soil around them. Watching him work with such skill and care was not just remarkable but a clear sign of the benefits of our family garden beyond just the harvest.

Bo, four years old, brought his own unique flair to the day. Singing and dancing around the garden beds, his job was to drop seeds into the trenches we dug, a task he performed with a concentration that involved tiny hand pats to cover them with soil. His vibrant spirit added a light-hearted rhythm to our planting efforts, reminding us that work can also be playful and joyous.

Not to be left out, Faith, our adventurous one-year-old, played her role with gusto. She busied herself removing cans that protected young peppers, taste-testing the soil, and occasionally wandering off with a crucial tool or a handful of seeds. Her antics, while challenging, brought laughter and a few light-hearted sighs from all of us, making the mark of gardening with a toddler even more memorable.

Gardening, especially at the scale we've undertaken, is more than a hobby; it's a season-long commitment that teaches patience, responsibility, and the cycle of life. The tasks involved—digging, planting, weeding, and watering—are time intensive and physically engaging, pulling us away from digital screens and into the rhythms of nature. They complain about the mosquitoes, how hot they are and how boring picking weeds is throughout the Summer, but isn’t that part of life? Sometimes work isn’t always rainbows and unicorns. This hands-on connection with the dirt offers us a break from the fast-paced, technology-driven world, grounding us in something real and nurturing, even if its not fun all the time. 

Our garden provides food for us all year long, but gardening, for us, goes beyond cultivating food; it cultivates life lessons and family bonds. Moreover, these days spent in the garden strengthen our relationship with each other and with mother-earth. The lessons learned here are enriched with every weed pulled (there are A LOT!) and every vegetable harvested. As I watch my kids grow just like the seedlings they tend, I’m reminded that this garden is a labor of love and a legacy of learning that I hope they will cherish and maybe, one day, pass on to their own children. The answer is all around me—in the soil, in the plants, and in the eager (or reluctant) faces of my kids, who are growing up understanding the value of nurturing life and mother-earth.