What was your gardening experience, if any, as a child?

[Beekissed]

My grandma always had a garden and my folks always tried to garden wherever they lived, but we didn't really get into depending on the garden until we moved off-grid and started to homestead when I was 10 or 11 years old.

Until then I hadn't really helped much in the garden except for helping dig potatoes and such. When we moved back on that homestead, we put in massive gardens and that was when the real work began.

Seemingly endless rows of hoeing, weeding, suckering, staking and tying up, picking long rows of beans, a whole potato patch instead of a few rows, picking mountains of corn and sitting in a circle to shuck it.....yeah, we were forced to garden. :/

I simply LOVE to garden now! I love the miracle of planting a seed and watching it grow into buckets of food for my family. I love to see well kept gardens and I like to go out in the early morning and traipse through...picking off things here, pruning there, smelling the rich smell of the soil and blossoms.

I think watching my grandma and my mother walk their gardens and take such pride and care with their growing affected me in a very positive way. It was almost like an extension of their mothering, but they were just mothering their gardens.

I see myself much like that...the grand matriarch of the land~ nurturing the animals, the plants, the bees. Just an extension of my mothering instinct. :bee :watering

 

[digitS']

I have told Northernrose (more than once) about my first experience in a garden. That's because it was near where she lives in northern California.

I was 3 and 4 years old when we lived there on a little farm. My grandmother had retired there and she was the gardener in the family. I can still remember standing in her garden and looking up into the bells of foxglove. When I later began to grow flowers, I remembered the names that she taught me .

We moved and lived on farms in southern Oregon. Altho' Dad farmed, he didn't want to take much time with gardens. Mom was suppose to be in charge there but she wasn't very interested either. I remember one year that Dad put so much cow manure on the garden that it burned up! I think it was the year after that Mom only planted cantaloupe seed. We had a HUGE cantaloupe patch! I thought it was great !

My job in the garden was weeding and I was handed a hoe. I learned to hate a hoe :/.

After we moved off the farm, I became interested in having my own garden. I was either 16 or 17 years old and can only remember growing greenbeans and turnips. The turnips were for my rabbits.

When I was in my 20's, I finally moved back to the country and worked on the neighboring farms. I had a garden at home but would spend the day on a tractor or a swather or a combine. At some point, I went to work for a greenhouse so that I had a year-around income. All that time, I was growing vegetables, along with the greenhouse flowers.

There were a few breaks when I finally realized that farming and greenhouse work weren't going to pay like having a job in town. When I first moved to town, a neighbor came over and asked me if I was going to mow the dandelions in the yard at my new home. I wanted to tell her what I could do with that insignificant, little, patch of dandelions !

For each of the last 23 years, I've had gardens and much of that time, in multiple locations . . .
Oops! I guess I stopped being a kid along in there, somewhere !

Steve

 

[seedcorn]

G'dad had a huge garden that fed them in TN. G'mom had several huge flower gardens w/annuals, perennials, etc.

Mom & Dad had 2 large gardens. Only job I seemed to get was pick strawberries--up until recently I hated strawberries. At a very early age, they allowed me to have my own little 2' X 5' garden where I proceeded to mix up weeds from plants. I weeded the weeds very well.

Then over the year until Dad's death, we had a race to see who could get the first tomato. cheating was allowed. When they moved to KY to retire, they had a garden large enough to feed 10 Walton sized families plus Mom had 3-4 butterfly gardens.

Today, I have 2 gardens with several flower patches all over and my daughter has a 10' by 30' rock flower garden. Not sure where my son will fit in all of this.

 

[dragonlaurel]

One stepfather had a green thumb and grew plenty of veggies. If he had been I good guy, I probably would have learned to garden from him. Us kids harvested stuff for dinner sometimes.

My Mom grew roses and some other flowers, but no veggie beds. She tried tomatoes, but when that bed died- she gave up on them. She has a sandy 1/4 acre. I hated mowing it.

I tried growing a few potted plants growing up but didn't have confidence in my abilities. I finally realized that certain plants needed different conditions than I had and tried again. My plants are happier now, and gardening is becoming part of my life.

 

[elf]

Keep'm coming. As a retired teacher, I am enjoying reading and thinking, "Oh, right, I don't have to grade these" ...no, you all get A+ for sharing this unique part of yourself. Hey, don't let that make you worry about grammar. I wasn't an English teacher, and it's content that counts. And your next assignment is......

 

[Whitewater]

I am my Nana's child, I'm pretty sure. My mother doesn't garden, not really. She dabbles in perenialls (sp?) and occasionally plants a pretty plant or keeps a house plant alive (she has an orchid in their sunroom), but she doesn't garden like loves the earth, happily gets dirty, pores over seed catalogs . . . the tongue in cheek phrase 'seed porn' offends. She forgot to take the basil I gave her to her summer residence!

But her mother, my Nana, had a lovely grape arbor (she made grape jelly), I remember tomatoes and probably beans, lots of pretty flowers in the front yard, and *she* was a gardener. Probably came from her own parents, who had a small storefront and raised their own food (including a pig and a cow) in the small backyard of their small house.

If my wild passion for vegetable gardening is genetic at all, it comes from my biological family -- I'm adopted!

As a kid Mom never needed or wanted help with her occasional flowers, gardening wasn't on my radar, but I had the bug, subconsciously, always interested in growing things, used to stop and look at the plants in the park, loved those 4th grade science experiments where you grow a bean in a plastic cup, on and on.

Never really had a chance to garden until we bought this house, though -- our first -- and now Hubby just lets me do whatever, he doesn't try to control my urge to grow things So long as we can afford it, I do it!

Last year was the first time I'd ever gotten the chance to garden for real. The year before that we had *just* bought this house, and that summer the interior was the priority, not to mention moving and so on, we closed in early June and by the time we got settled, it was too late.

But last year . . . I only had 2 tomato plants and 3 zucchini plants and 3 pepper plants and about a dozen brand new strawberry plants and a couple raspberry plants from a friend and I took to gardening like a duck takes to water. Immediately I knew that here was something I could do and do well. I didn't hesitate. It was like coming back to a long-lost home.

I still kill flowers. But edible plants? Heck yah! I am in love with just about everything that gardening involves, from planning it out over the winter, to figuring out what kind of new seeds I want, to the backbreaking labor of getting the patch ready in the spring and, of course, seeing and eating the results . . . it's all good. Really good.

I am such an addict. And growing up, absolutely nobody including myself would have said 'Who, me? Yeah, I love to garden'. And my mother now is always so taken aback when I start babbling on about my garden, I guess she figured that I wasn't that sort -- boy was she wrong!

Funny how we turn out. I didn't get hardly any exposure (just whatever Nana did when I was around her, briefly) as a kid, but my love for growing green things is in my blood and bone, it just needed a chance to come out.

Now that I've gotten the experience, I don't think I'm ever going to stop.


Whitewater

 

[CountryGirl]

My dad planted a large garden. I can remember him saying that he had planted 1000 tomato plants. He also planted green beans, potatoes, corn, and green peppers. He sold the produce at his grocery store. That was before large grocery chains. Of course we kids had to work in the garden and the store. People would come in the store and want to know when the tomatoes would be ready. They would buy 1/2 bushels of green tomatoes as well as ripe tomatoes to can. When I was a teen I didn't care to work in the garden. It's hard to get the green tomato stain off your hands when your trying to look nice to go on a date. Or I'm picking green beans and a Daddy Longleg spider is sitting on a leaf as I reach for a green bean. THOSE SPIDERS LOVED GREEN BEANS. THERE SEEM TO BE HUNDREDS!(spiders, not green beans - well there were hundreds of those too.)

We also had an old apple tree in our yard. It was there when we purchased the house. (It was an old farm house with five acres and grandma bought the house next door.) Mom and grandma would use all the apples from that tree. If an apple dropped on the ground they would cut out the bruise and use the rest of the apple. Picking up the apples off the ground was another chore we kids did. We couldn't mow the lawn by the apple tree until the apples that fell were picked up. We had at least one bee sting every summer because the bees would be everywhere on the drop apples.

I look back at those times with fond memories. I didn't like it at the time but I remember how good the vegetables and fruit tasted when fresh from the garden or in winter when we had meals using the vegetables that mom and grandma had canned. Most members of my family on my mom and dad's side gardened to some degree. It was a way of life and it was good times.

I get frustrated because I don't experience the kind of success my relatives did. But I have my memories and I get to relive them every summer as I plant my own garden. :watering

 

[PotterWatch]

Found a picture of my sister and I with some garden goodies:

My boys with some of last year's corn:

I need to make my boys help more with the garden, but I usually just let them do a little bit. I do have one who really likes to help with planting though. I do make a point to teach them as much as I can about the different plants and how they grow so hopefully if they want to garden as adults they still have some of that knowledge.

 

[elf]

I love all these kid photos. It's like an album.

 

[davaroo]

I grew up part time on a Wisconsin dairy farm and the rest in suburban California.
There was always a garden around, along with chickens and other animals.
Being around the food we ate as it grew, walked or flew was taken for granted. But like a back beat that has never gone away, I keep it alive.

I am setting up a new garden at our new house and my neighbor has been watching me intently - the garden is on his side of our house. I'm using tires and layering on cardboard for weed control, putting down mulch and compost - getting a jump start on the garden in a new spot.

Derrick, my neighbor, is a young black man from Houston's inner city and has never grown anything in his life. He's a nice young bloke, but is pretty clueless about gardening.

"You mean there will be tomatoes and cucumbers and melons and lettuce and all that stuff from these tires?" he asked.

"Yep."

"And all those rotten grass clippings you hauled home are gonna help?"

"Right again... they're called 'mulch' and 'compost'. They help feed the plants and control evaporation of water. "

"And you're going to collect rain water in those barrels?"

"Dont want it to go to waste, it's free and it's good for the plants." I said.

"Man, Ive never seen anything like that...."

"Buddy, you'd be amazed at what you can produce in your own backyard.... "

And to think, it all began when I was a kid.