What The Garden Teaches

 

My son doesn't like salad but I'm happy that he will grow up knowing what it's like to walk out into the back garden and pick a bunch of edible plants and make them into a salad that everyone can enjoy.

He's not very involved in my veggie gardening and I don’t push him. I try to grow things that he likes and I show him how to identify edible plants - both weeds and things I planted - and he can always pick what he wants and eat it. He may have liked helping with whatever I was doing when he was a toddler, but he’s a tween now and he has his own interests.

Yesterday we were in the back garden and he asked about a plan that was making a low carpet all over one of my raised beds. It’s chickweed - it’s a weed but I do what I can to encourage its growth in my garden because it makes a nice edible green that grows in Winter with no effort on my part. 

Then he said - let's pick some fruit and veggies and make an exotic salad. He picked gooseberries and chickweed. I went around showing him what else might be good. We added some cilantro, arugula, calendula petals and nasturtium flowers, a little sage and rosemary. He had a look at the sugar snap peas, but none were ready to pick. He picked a couple of carrots but declared them to common for his ‘exotic’ salad.

He took our harvest inside, washed the greens himself, and made a beautiful salad. He didn’t want to eat any. But he enjoyed making it and seeing the rest of the household enjoy it. He likes to eat each of these ingredients individually sometimes but he doesn’t like salad.

 

 

He reminded me of how easy it is to throw together a salad from whatever is in my garden at the time. I have got to be real with you, here in the midst of Winter, I had been taking a lot of those plants for granted. Feeling like I should find something to do with them but not coming up with anything. He reminded me to get creative.

I didn’t grow up with a vegetable garden in the backyard. We might have had a few herbs in a pot from time to time, but that’s it. When I got into vegetable gardening it was all new and exciting and foreign to me. So I just love that my son already has the knowledge and the confidence to walk out into a garden and find food. That is just everyday magic for him; it’s just always been there. The rest of it, the knowledge and the skills and the day to day work of it, he could pick up any time he wants. I know better than to try to ‘make’ my son learn anything; it doesn’t work. Sometimes the teaching is just in the doing. Doing my own thing and being open to welcoming him into that in whatever way he wants.