Lessons from the garden ~ a reflection by Jennifer Jansen

BY JENNIFER JANSEN

Do you know that old saying about your eyes being bigger than your stomach?  Well, my eyes were bigger than my garden.

It’s something that everyone who has ever planted a seed has to deal with.  It’s mid-February and you’re starting to feel like you haven’t actually been warm in weeks.  You’ve scraped the snow off your car for what feels like the 845^th time this year, your pant hems are permanently salt stained, and it’s starting to feel like winter is never ever going to end.

And then it arrives in the mailbox.

Hope. In the form of a seed catalogue.

Suddenly your daydreams (and likely your night dreams too) are filled with sugar snap peas and sunflowers and honeysuckle bushes.  You start putting little x’s next to stuff in the catalogue, and by the time you’re ready to place your order, there’s more things in the catalogue with x’s than without!

This summer was no different.  I had plans.  BIG plans.

For starters, I was going to be on Maternity leave, so I would have all sorts of free time.  (Amazing, isn’t it, how easily we forget what life with a newborn is like?  I blame my memory loss on the fact that my first son ate every 2 hours, night and day, for the first year of his life.  I think I’m still catching up on my sleep 4 years later!)

Secondly, I was so excited that my nearly 4 year old son would be just the right age for his own little plot in the garden, which he would lovingly tend as his Mama tended the “big garden.”

That’s not exactly how things turned out.

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Our gardening adventures started back in March, when we planted our seedlings.  I was disappointed that my son wanted little to do with the dirt and the little seeds.  He filled one seed tray, declared himself done, and went back to boisterously saving the world from bad guys.

I guess the slow, meticulous work wasn’t exactly his speed.

Our seeds slowly sprouted in the window of our master bedroom, while we (I) eagerly looked on.

“Look, G, they’re growing!”

“Can we eat them yet?”

“Not yet, sweetheart.”

And back he went to saving the world.

Once spring dawned, I decided that a trip to the garden centre was in order.  What better way to get him excited than to surround him with green goodness.  It sure got my heart a flutter!  By then I had staked off a little corner of the garden of his very own.

“What do you think you want to plant in your garden, bud?  Do you want flowers?  Vegetables?”

“FOOD, Mommy, I want FOOD.”

I giggled.  Food it is!

(Remember how I mentioned him eating every 2 hours for the first year of his life…he never actually stopped, he just changed food sources!)

So off to the garden centre we went in search of “food.”

My son picked out some cherry tomatoes, some broccoli (the kid loves broccoli, what can I say?) and some romaine lettuce (Caesar salads being right up there next to broccoli on his list of favourite foods.)

I was excited, he was excited, and this was going well!

Then, things went horribly south when we got to the cash register – my little guy was more than a little upset when he realized that the cashier was going to KEEP 4 of the 5 shiny loonies that he’d been so carefully clutching in his palm for the last hour, in exchange for his food plants.   He was ready to give back his food, abandon it all, if only to have his loonies back!  It appeared that I neglected to explain the most basic details of the transaction.  I learned 2 important lessons that day:  One – things that may seem terribly basic to you, isn’t necessarily understood by a young child.  Two – never take a kid to the garden centre that close to nap time!

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Our garden was fully planted and flourished.  My son and I came to a silent agreement.  I would garden, while he would keep the garden safe from all the various dinosaurs and dragons that seemed to be lurking in our vicinity.  (I don’t know how their population got to be so high!)  If there was something exciting in the garden to see, or more importantly, to eat, I would share it with him.  At first this felt like a parenting fail to me – my son wasn’t interested in doing something with me that I loved so much, and that I felt was so important.  He wasn’t interested in digging holes, pulling weeds, indentifying plants, or even digging for worms or other creepy crawlies in the garden.

However, at the end of the day, he has learned a very important lesson from all this – that food doesn’t necessarily have to come from the grocery store.  We can grow it ourselves, in our very own backyard.  It takes time, and patience, and hard work (not to mention someone to keep the dragons at bay) but the rewards of being able to grab a handful of peas or tomatoes or whatever is in bloom at the time was more than worth the effort.

I also found camaraderie with some other moms with their own miniature dragon slayers.  We gardened together, many hands making light work and all that, while the little ones played together.  We stopped occasionally to count heads, to break up the occasional tussle, or have a popsicle break, and we managed to get an incredible amount of work done in a short period of time, and even squeezed in some adult conversation. We did a good amount of canning together too.

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One weekend, I was away for a day, and when I returned to inspect my garden, I saw that my peas had exploded while I was gone.  I picked a few off the vine and my son and I munched on them on the ride to preschool.

“This is really good, Mom, I like it!”  exclaimed my son, clutching a pea in his hand.

Now that was TOTALLY a parenting win, and something to be thankful for!

~

Jennifer Jansen’s blog, Simple Matters, describes her experiences living in rural Melancthon with two children, including their transition to country living, cloth diapering, gardening and eco-friendly gift-giving. When not on maternity leave, she works with Earth Rangers.