The Bright Side: All in a Day's Work

There are many days when I go to bed feeling inadequate and defeated. I hate days like those, but on days when we work in our garden, I always go to bed feeling awesome. Gardening is a project that involves our whole family, produces long term pay-offs, and teaches my kids about hard work. There are physical as well as psychological benefits and so many life lessons that we learn from this family project.

Last year I made the mistake of not investing much time and energy in our garden because, you know, we were supposed to be moving. When Halloween rolled around and there were no pumpkins to pick, we were pretty bummed. Paying too much money for pumpkins at the grocery store was not the same : /

So, this year we planted strawberries, onions, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, and watermelon. Plus we will enjoy the raspberries, grapes, and blueberries from previous years. And boy do I feel good about that!

This is a small sampling of the weeds we pulled about a month ago. I told the kids I’d pay them a nickel a weed. When we got to 1500 weeds, we scrapped that idea and decided our reward would be the produce from the garden.