City Kids in the Garden

Today's post is a guest post from Sarah, a frequent contributor to Eat Breathe Blog.
A few years ago, when the costs of gas and groceries were skyrocketing, my husband and I started to look into ways that we could save money. We had been interested in sustainable living for a while, and we made some changes immediately: cloth diapers, reusable feminine hygiene products, recycling for money, and so forth. We also made a concerted effort to conserve fuel whenever possible, planning our trips so that we would be able to do all of our errands on one day instead of running an errand or two every day, and making sure that our cars were tuned up with new spark plugs.
However, we felt that we could do much more. I had recently taken a class that dealt exclusively with sustainable living, and using the knowledge I gained in that class and instructive videos and blogs on the Internet, we looked into growing our own food, raising chickens, creating our own sources of energy (solar, wind, etc.), and other ideas. Most of what we researched, we determined to be out of our reach. We lived in the city, so raising chickens was out of the question; and neither one of us felt that it would be possible to create our own solar panels and/or wind turbines.
However, the idea of growing our own food was so simple that there was no reason why we couldn’t do it, or so we thought. I went out and bought a lot of seeds, and talked my mother, who owns several acres in a neighboring farming town, into letting us plant a vegetable garden. Unfortunately, that was the summer that my marriage ended, and I became so caught up in my personal problems that I soon forgot about my interest in growing my own food.
The next summer, my mother called and asked if I was still interested in planting a garden, and although I definitely was, I was working full-time by that point, and didn’t have time for the 30 minute drive to her house. I didn’t feel that I would be able to commit myself to such a large project, and I didn’t feel as if the cost of gas for so much driving would balance the benefits of the garden. However, my mom and cousin ended up planting the garden with the seeds I bought the year before, and had a modest yield at the end of the summer.
Fast-forward to this year: last December, I lost my job and my apartment within the span of two weeks, and I moved to my hometown out of necessity. I struggled to find work throughout the next six months, and started to spend lots of time at my mom’s house. When springtime finally came, I was settled into a job and starting to get back on my feet again, and my mom asked once again if I would like to plant a garden. This time, I agreed without hesitation.
Unfortunately, the weather refused to comply with my desire to garden. Lots of rain and abnormally cold temperatures were quickly followed by more rain and unseasonably hot weather. None of this was conducive to planting a garden, and I had all but given up on the possibility. My mother reminded me more than once, but every time I made plans to drive the 2 ½ miles to her house, something would come up and I would have to postpone. I had pretty much decided that the garden would have to wait another year.
But this wasn’t the case. Last Sunday dawned clear and beautiful. The temperature was a balmy 72⁰ and the sun was shining. It rained sporadically a couple of days earlier, so the ground was a little moist, but no overly so, and it wasn’t as hot and muggy as it had been in most of the days leading up to this one. My kids and I packed everything that we would need for a day of gardening into my car and headed out.
When we got there, I was greeted by my brother and a rusty Roto-Spader that had seen better days. My brother, who does lawn work for a living, volunteered to run the machine, and I happily accepted. We decided to till the patch of ground that had been used the year before, and he marked the area and got to work. When I saw him battling with the bucking machine, I was glad that I had agreed to let him do the hard work.
My son stayed outside to watch his uncle work, and my daughter and I went indoors to pick out the seeds we would use for our garden. Due to our late start in the planting season, there were a couple of vegetables that we weren’t able to use, but we were able to find many that we felt would work. The ones we chose were: butternut and straightneck early yellow squash, carrots, lettuce, corn salad, broccoli, sweet corn, garden beans, radishes and cantaloupe, along with some tomato plants my mom had bought.
Before we started, we decided what would be planted in each row. We took into account whether the individual vegetable needed to be grown in direct sunlight, or partial shade, and ended up with ten rows of vegetables. We then scoured my mom’s backyard for sticks that were at least a foot long; these sticks would mark the end of each row, so we would know what was growing where, and where we needed to weed.
Both of my kids have been raised in the city until now, so this was an entirely new experience for them. Neither of them like to get dirty, and they were horrified when I told them to take their shoes off and walk in the garden barefoot so as not to trample down the earth. However, my son smiled when he stepped into the freshly-turned earth, and told his trepid sister “Hey, the dirt feels really good against my feet.” With this assurance, she stepped into the garden.
The first thing we had to do was clean up the area a little. The Roto-Spader had left behind large clumps of grass and dirt, and we got to work throwing the larger clumps and other debris out of the garden. The smaller pieces of grass remained, mostly due to laziness and my sore back, but also because I figured that they would help to nourish the garden as it grew.
After that was finished, we started planting. On the back of each seed packet was clear instructions on how far to space the seeds apart and how deep to bury them. My children really enjoyed this part; I pointed out where each seed went, and they dug their little fingers into the rich earth as they pushed the seeds down and covered them with a thin layer of dirt. We even developed a chant as we went along: “Push and cover, push and cover, push and cover.” My daughter, being the little performer that she is, put the words to a tune when it was her turn.

My mother planted the tomato plants on the outer edge and the kids took turns helping her and me. Whereas I had always thought that planting a garden would be a boring, back-breaking experience, it actually went very quickly and was extremely enjoyable. I admit that I have become quite the city girl after nearly 20 years of living away from the country, and I felt as if I were rediscovering my roots. My mother shared funny stories of gardening with her parents as a child, and my children, mother and I enjoyed ourselves immensely.
After a row was planted, my kids took turns pushing the branches into the dirt and putting the empty seed envelopes on them to indicate what was growing in that row. At the end of our first day of gardening, we had ten neatly-planted and –marked rows, and my children looked at the small patch of land with satisfied smiles, and ran off to play in the warm sun.
Sarah Long is a homeschooling single mother of two with an avid interest in sustainable living and all things green. She is a frequent contributor to Eat Breathe Blog, a blog devoted to all of her favorite topics of discussion and much more. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.