My Daughter's Garden

I've been very busy of late, and as a result I haven't really taken the time to write to you about everything new that's been going on at my house. One thing I've neglected to write about is the garden that my younger daughter has started.

For as far back as I can remember my younger daughter, who is 11, has wanted to grow a garden. When we lived at Vent Haven, though, this wasn't really a possibility. We couldn't grow a garden in the front of the museum where visitors would see it. And the area behind the museum that my daughters used as a back yard had several HUGE trees that towered over it so that the sun never hit the ground back there. It was a great place for a child imagining that she was lost in an evil forest. It was not such a great place for trying to grow anything. Heck, we had a hard enough time just getting GRASS to grow.

So when we moved to our new house one of the things we promised (in addition to getting a dog, which we checked off the list more than a year ago) was that my younger daughter could finally get her garden. And she has. About six weeks ago we planted against the sunniest side of the house nine tomato plants, two cucumber plants, a strawberry plant, a watermelon vine, and a green pepper plant. And everything so far is doing great. My daughter takes care of the garden, weeding and watering it each day it doesn't rain, and we already have plenty of vegetables. So far we've eaten TWO strawberries (Yes, that's TWO. Count 'em.), but there are plenty of vegetables that aren't quite ready on the vine, including a green pepper that's about half the size of one you'd get at a grocery store, and a cucumber (see photo) that's about 2/3 of the size.

More than anything else, I view this as a learning experience for my daughter, but I'm also looking forward to eating some fresh vegetables. As the little green tomatoes begin to appear on the vines, though, I AM beginning to wonder why we felt it important to get NINE tomato plants. I don't even like tomatoes that much! Ah, well. I envision tomato salads and tomato preserves and tomato soup will be a large part of the August menu at the Sweasy household.

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Oh, and by the way, I took the photos above during a rainstorm Saturday morning. I opened the kitchen door and looked out and it didn't seem to be raining so hard, so I quickly stepped outside and took the top photo. When I bent down to take the photo of the cucumber, though, and to put my fingers by it as a point of reference, it was like God turned on the faucet--the skies opened up, and in the ten seconds it took me to snap the photo and get back into the house I was completely drenched; my hair was dripping and I all but needed to wring out my shirt. Nice.