Mia has been asking just about everyday for the past month to grow vegetables. She has been saving seeds from her fruits and vegetables. We told her she should use what we have if she is adamant on growing. She has currently covered my back porch in pots of dirt with her little plant babies.

Ryan and I love gardening, one day we hope to have enough land to grow all the vegetables we would need. It all started with a few tomato plants and some herbs grown in pots in our backyard seven years ago. We had so many tomatoes that we were able to gift them to our neighbors and make salsa the entire summer.

The following summer we got serious with raised beds and vegetables such as bell peppers, squash and greens. The girls were at the best age to help in the garden and the loved looking for edible treasures. I was so proud to be able to cook and feed the girls vegetables form the garden. They would eat tomatoes and cucumbers right off the vines.

We also started composing which we felt helped our harvest. We experimented with many new things including growing potatoes in a pot. The video or blog said that you could yield a hundred potatoes from a few old potatoes with tubers. We laugh thinking about how excited we were after l four months for the many sweet potatoes awaiting us. Daddy slowly followed the yellowing leaves and unearthed the waiting surprises. The first potato was small but perfect and gave us hope to uncover more. About thirty minutes later we still had only one potato. It was the best bite of sweet potato ever.

We had not been able to get our garden together the last few years. We have been so blessed to be able to visit and pick fresh vegetables in the company of friends.

Mia has been asking and asking for her dad to build her raised beds for a vegetable garden since last summer when our garden was not very productive. Our first summer in our new home did not produce the desired results. Last year we raised many plant babies just to transfer them to their doom which was our soil. We think the ground was too hard for them to grow adequate roots and they did not get enough sun. Living in the neighborhood that we do, it is difficult for vegetables to grow because of all the trees surrounding our home.

I found some wooden garden boxes for sale. I didn’t realize how big they were and only came home with one. The nice man found out I was pregnant and brought over the second box. We spent the next morning at the gardening center loading up on dirt and vegetables. We were talked into getting a hibiscus for the bees and Madelyn’s eating pleasure. The girls stayed outside all day and earned their bath complete with dirt stuck under their nails. Norah loved helping. She helped so much that she broke a few plants. We discovered our baby fig trees we planted last year survived the snow and freezing temperatures of last month. We also found some growth in a few of our aloe plants, hydrangea and azaleas that we thought were goners.

We love how determined they can be when it comes to something they really want. Gardening is such a great way for all of us to learn together. It teaches patience and perseverance. The girls forced us to spend the day outside and we were able to find growth where we thought we had lost. We were all pretty bummed about our garden last year but we talked about what might have gone wrong and learned from it. We are praying this year’s efforts yield better results. Although the destination and results do not really matter, it is about the journey and the growth that’s happening along the way.