Gardening is NOT a Family Affair

Gardening is not a family project!

Consider yourself warned.
It is, however, very good for families.

It seems that pulling together to provide for our daily bread is exhausting, not because hauling dirt, bending over to weed, getting up to your wrists in worm doo or cleaning up potting soil from your kitchen floor is work. It’s exhausting because hauling the vacuum out to clean up leads to emoting and temper flares, which causes youngsters to injure themselves. Then they are madder because you have forced them into child labor in the first place.

How much worse is this that this child labor is referred to as a ‘school project’ or learning. It doesn’t start well, but at least he’s not old enough to follow up with, “What will you do next year, when you aren’t home schooling me? You won’t be able to call it ‘learning’ then.”

I, the mom, start with, “We’re going to repot the starts and start germinating the other herbs and the squash. This’ll be fun. Find those teal and salmon colored garden gloves, kiddo.”  It should be fun, right? Getting to play in dirt. Not when mom talked about not splurging and sprinkling it around the kitchen. We’re indoors cause it’s cold and rainy outside, AGAIN.

My first sign that he doesn’t think is going to be any fun?  He demands to know where those gloves are and when I start saying exactly where each pair is, he interrupts with, “What salmon? What? What? Wha…?” Uh oh.  I’m in for a prostest fest! He repeated and for emphasis dropped the final consonant. He continues  cutting off every sentence out of my mouth. When it’s an instruction for the task, he says “I don’t wanna…” When it’s an oral assessment question, like, “What part of the seed becomes the plant?” he pulls out half a scientific fact. “The part that germinates…” He trails off. He’s already learning to BS. David Spade would reply, “Did I hear a Niner in there? Are you talking on a walkie talkie?”

It is real learning. We compare a popcorn kernel, a watermelon seed crushed open and an egg to talk about the kernel, the endosperm, the germ, the bran. The egg is a good comparison since it’s larger. Getting gooey with it is fun, for a bit. Till mom says, “Okay, now, time to finish transplanting the tomatoes. Now look for the seedlings with mature leaves. They are the ones with more than two points. It’s like the leaves are getting ‘fingers’.” He just starts filling  3” pots with dirt and dumping any old seedling it. THEN, he asks if it’s the right one. “This one. Not that one,” I say. He snorts. “How do you know?” He challenges. Wow. Bravado.

He is the only one in the kitchen with me because that is his project for the moment, but also because we’ve already had a blow up with the teenage daughter. She’s out earning money for someone’s present. It’s better for her to avoid this family affair right now. Dad is off on another honey do. He’ll be building raised beds for the yard later this week, when money isn’t quite so tight.

How do I teach my son, and daughter, that this thrift is partially about eating better without breaking our bank, which is broken already, and learning where good food comes from, and appreciating God’s green earth. I remember being bribed to finish weeding peas and beans with trips to Pine Lake, a stellar water hole that we longed to visit each summer. It was the only beach I visited in Indiana during my childhood years to boast soft white sandy beaches. It had the BEST racing slide. I still hated weeding.

Or, the day my pregnant mother napped my siblings and left me on the front porch with what felt like thirty cobs of corn to husk. It was August and I was husking sweet corn. It would taste great to me later, if I didn’t become a dead pin cushion for the dang bees who were batty for the corn in their final throes of existence. I wept as they crawled my scabby shins. I was sure I would be stung. I ran away, came back, tried so hard to finish. All I remember is wailing and sobbing and begging to be allowed to come into the cool air to finish. My mother would have no hairs of sweet corn in her newly mopped kitchen. I finished, sobbing all the way.

That’s what our house was like tonight. There was an episode of yelling and sobbing, but not about gardening. Instead it was about getting to be a teenager in the way the adolescent felt asserted her independence, not in the way her parents deemed ‘safe.’  When I said, let’s go ahead and finish this planting and transplanting, my son said something about the teenager still yelling at us. We were resigned to letting her finish emoting enough to settle into our demands. She wasn’t going to like it any more than my son made peace with his teal gardening gloves, handling an hour’s worth of minor planting in a temperature controlled environment and delaying his itch for the last of his Easter Peeps.

Gardening. It’s not for family fun. But it sure is for families.

My kitchen is now covered in trays of tomatoes begging Indiana to hustle its chubs and get 60 degree nights on regularly. It’ll drop to 38 tonight. The lettuce and arugula love it. The rutabagas are ‘growing the best’ declared my son with a glance.

So, as I finished by showing my son how we are trying to recycle rain water, and he demanded to know why technology wasn’t just going to fix our water problems in the future, I sighed.

“Drag the potting soil and earthworm casings outside, dude. I’ll sweep the floor.”

This unit is about patience. The fruit of what I’m planting won’t show up until they are grown ups. After all, I swore I’d never garden.