My Garden Helper

I am excited and a little surprised at how well our garden is doing this year. I am by no means a green thumb and have even managed to kill weeds! But somehow, when it comes to growing vegetables I manage to inherit a little of my Dad's amazing gardening skills (my Mother-in-Law has an awesome green thumb as well.) I was beginning to think I got overlooked or maybe gardening talent skipped a generation, but I now realize I just had to be able to eat it.

On this day (it was actually the end of last week), Zoey and I had a project to do. We were planting more seeds in pots to grow so we could later transplant them to our garden. Zoey was ready to help so we dug right in, literally...

First we got out the potting soil and filled up the pots and empty egg carton so we could plant the seeds. This was Zoey's favorite part because she got to play in the dirt. She just loves getting dirty.

Zoey, who is mildly OCD I think, had to get all the openings in the egg carton the same amount of soil. She had a blast moving, adding, taking away and generally rearranging the dirt. I let her play with it for a while because she was having so much fun.

Finally, it was time to plant! I showed Zoey how I was getting the seeds from the Cilantro plant to grow some new ones. Turns out our Cilantro plant, which was quickly dying, flowers and produces seeds so it can keep coming back. I decided I would help the process along a bit. I attempted to explain to Zoey how the seeds we are putting in the dirt will grow to become yummy plants, but I don't know that she understood. Hopefully she will understand better as the plants grow.

Now that the seeds were planted, Zoey helped me do some weeding in our garden. Well, I did the weeding and she played in the dirt of the empty spots in the garden. I figure she is actually helping by keeping that soil loose and ready for planting. And she was having a blast! She loves using the trowels to dig in the dirt. 

While Zoey was digging and exploring the garden she found a little rolly-polly bug. She was fascinated with it and let it crawl over her hand for a little bit. She showed it to me and I told her about it and how the bugs help the garden to grow. She seemed happy with her find and eventually let it go, she didn't even kill this one!

Next, we watered all of the garden, our herbs and our new seedlings. Zoey loves this part and will stand under the hose so she gets wet too. Maybe that is why she grows so fast, I keep her well watered. She will also often get her little watering can and ask for water so she can water by herself. She loves that and our herbs especially get a lot of Zoey watering. 

Creampuff, the cat, likes the weeding and sitting out in the sun part. She hung out with us pretty much the whole time we were in the garden. She ran away when I started watering though, pretty much immediately after the above picture was taken. 

I'm so glad Zoey enjoys being outside and helping in the garden. I hope that next year she can have her own little plot of soil to plant things in. The hardest thing she hasn't quite learned yet is that we shouldn't pick the tomatoes until they start turning red. She loves to pick them, but they just don't taste as good green. But she will eat them green, especially the cherry tomatoes, so at least they aren't going to waste. 

I am very excited that our garden is doing well. I love that we can go out and get veggies or herbs for dinner. This is also the most fun I've had with jalapenos. I've never really cooked with them much, but so far jalapenos have been our best harvest so I'm finding all kinds of ways to cook them. I've made pico de gallo, jalapeno burgers (Stephen's idea) and they are really good cut up and mixed into ground beef or beans for tacos.

If you've ever wanted to have a garden, I would highly recommend it! I personally love the connection with nature and the produce are very tasty too! Even if all you have room for are some herbs on a window sill or potted tomatoes on the back porch it is so worth it. If you don't succeed right away, it's okay to try again!