Well, I believe this is our 50th consecutive year of vegetable, fruits and flower gardening! And we’re talking 2 half acre vegetable garden plots.
After an exhausting first year of raising and preserving various garden “treasures”, I declared, fruits and vegetables would be purchased from
supermarkets and summer roadside stands!! Well……..here I am, married 55 years (same strong bodied, strong willed guy), and this year’s veggie garden coming on in blue ribbon style! Days away from my 79th birthday, I can hear our garden making a deal with both Dale and me “weed-till-harvest-preserve, and I will make you feel strong in body and mind” ! Yes, “tired, dirty and sweaty” fall in there somewhere!
But! here’s the “kicker”! We think gardening strengthens both body and mind. Now some who know us well might challenge the word “strong” as applied to the mind!!! but speaking for myself, I like to pretend! Gardening not only provides us with a healthy diet, but a sense of pride that we feel when, in the early cool, damp June mornings we see the nearly mature vegetable plants, many of which, we sowed from seed ( way back in the early frostiness of March) weighted down with fresh green beans, edible peapods, new red potatoes, tight green heads of broccoli, summer squash just to list a few. I’d better put in a plug for the tomato crop–late July looks promising, but hoping blight etc. doesn’t have a negative effect like last year! A sense of pride sweeps over me when I see and feel how beautiful, not only our vegetable gardens are , but our flower gardens are too -at least at this moment in time!
With the taste of our own strawberries from late May still in our heads, and our own red raspberries, and a bumper crop of blueberries teasing our taste buds, I come to the reality that I better focus on this stack of pots and pans I just created from preparing spinach, peas and broccoli for next winter’s nourishment! (Oh, and the guy I mentioned earlier just walked in the kitchen door from putting a freshly baled load of hay in the barn announcing that our early applesauce apple tree–ready for picking in a very few days!) I don’t make these things up!!
We are now down to two hens, who have committed to an egg apiece each day. We thank them! Through the years, we have had as many as a dozen or more at a time, but predators take the toll at times! Won’t dwell on that issue!
Gardening? Yep! No matter how small or large, can help provide a platform for a more healthy body and mind!
