How gardening is teaching my kids teamwork while teaching me patience

Spinach salad incoming 🥗

This post is dedicated to my brother; a man of many trades

Hi friends! With summer here at full speed and also working full time, one of my biggest worries has been that my kids will be on their phones and tablets more than average. I am 100% percent a 90’s kid, and I grew up with outside summers. My wish is to be able to give my kids the same summers. Between work, alternating swim classes, and going out for nightly walks as a family, we are also growing a garden together ❤️ Let me tell you all about!

In every season, the lord always produces fruit

First of all, gardening was not my idea from the beginning-this was all fully inspired by my brother’s garden. He got my attention by sending pictures since Day 1 from his gardening journey this year, and when I saw how proud he was of his first harvest, I wanted in. He grows anything from Coolapeños, Shishito peppers,Spoon tomatoes, Hungarian Wax peppers ,Sweet Banana Peppers, Sweet stuff Mini stuffing Bell Peppers,Golden Zuchinnis, a variety of mixed tomatoes,jalapenos, potatoes, corn and cucumbers. It made sense for me to want to start as well ❤️ Especially for someone like me who is always trying to eat organic, clean, and farm to table food.

To be honest, if it hadn’t been for him, I would never come up with gardening as a hobby. Patience is unfortunately not a virtue of mine, as I thrive on the opposite of patience. I like to delegate things that require waiting and show up when it’s done. I don’t enjoy painting or building or cooking, and the thought of having a plant to take care of makes me nervous. My husband and kids, on the other hand, are creative humans. They are patient; they like drawing, painting, and watching something they built come together. They love acitvities like building Lego sets, my oldest likes knitting, my middle child loves drawing, my littlest one loves organizing his huge animal collection. They all love fishing – the list goes on and on about how great they are with things that require patience and commitment. One reason why I wanted to start a garden was so that we could all bond over it. Yet somehow, starting gardening with my family has actually taught ME patience, and the process of nourishing and growing my roots (literally and figuratively) has been so soothing for me.

We are not perfect harvesters ( yet), but boy, nothing beats the feeling of that first strawberry we grew, and all had a small microscopic slice to taste. We grew that! Our hands did it!

Corn 🌽

Pre gardening was a lot of work, but worth it at the end

Tomatoes 🍅

This was by far the hardest part of the process. We underestimated how much soil we would need. Not once but twice! In my head, I was thinking we just bought seeds, threw them in the ground, and watched them grow. LOL. It’s mental and physical work, to be honest! Our kids watched us work together to make sure we had all the pots, take turns planting the seeds, and then help with our first watering. We moved pots from where I wanted the plants to sit to where my husband knew they would get the best sun exposure. They help us water our plants daily, and they see how excited we get when we see any kind of growth. We are the ones putting the effort in growing them from day 1! Gardening is also teaching us a lesson. We’re having fast growth on some and slow growth on others. Life is just like that! We’re all different, and we all start as seeds in life and blossom into something bigger and different in life. No two plants are the same ❤️

This aligns with my health journey but also teaches me to disconnect and slow down

I’ve recently been extra strict with what I eat and what ingredients are in what I consume. I won’t eat something that I know has been super overly processed or that has crazy ingredients. While I can’t always force my family to not eat something, I try to make them conscious of food choices. I love my salads, and I love my veggies, and that is why I got interested in gardening in the first place. I have also learned that gardening brings me a certain peace. I can go out there at night time or after work and look at my plants, and it makes me happy. For someone who, for the majority of the time, is running around like a chicken without a head slowing down is hard. Winding down is hard. My body and my brain are always on go go go mode. My plants bring me silence, and they calm me. I stare at them, observe them, and I feel like they are a project that I was meant to start earlier in life. They bring me satisfaction in such an odd way. It’s nice to know I connect to myself and the earth in one way.

Soon ❤️

Here are some pictures of our garden and some of my brothers. Hopefully, our harvest will soon give us some good veggies. We are looking forward to a dinner from our garden soon ❤️ I encourage you to start a garden if you’ve ever been interested or in my case if you haven’t been before.

-CSY ❤️