Egg Antics and Garden Shenanigans

Eliza carefully scooped up the egg that was laying in the nesting box and exclaimed, "Emma laid an egg!"  She then brought the egg outside and placed it directly in the middle of her slide and let it go.  Somehow it survived.  She then proceeded to swing the egg back and forth as she carried it to the house, dropping it two more times.  I have no idea how the eggs make it into our kitchen safely sometimes.  Yes, this is homesteading with a honey badger, or children in general.

Two days ago it was Isis' turn to retrieve the afternoon egg.  You see, Marina lays in the morning and Emma lays around lunchtime.  It's nice because the children can take turns collecting the eggs.  Except this particular time Eliza didn't want to share the fun and proceeded to not so gently remove the egg from Isis' fingers which resulted in a broken egg on the ground and shrill cries from Eliza.  You see, Eliza typically likes to fry her egg immediately upon retrieval....farm to table in under two minutes.  Except when they fall and break.



People have asked me before about gardening with children.  How do you keep them out of the garden?  How do you keep them from smashing the seedlings?  Do they understand to stay in between the rows?  Let me answer this by saying Eliza likes to straddle our potato plants and Isis likes to hurdle the growing crops.  If I wanted a perfect garden, I would have waited until I was fifty. 

But I don't.  What I do want is for my children to see how food grows and see how fulfilling it can be to grow and collect our own nutrients.  I want them to identify foods and enjoy picking them even if they are weeks away from ripening.  I want them to see that a garden is a lot of work, but can also be enjoyable and fun.  Most importantly I simply want them to be among the food with little toes in the dirt and little fingers getting pricked, poked, muddy and sometimes holding a nice fat pepper that only gets two chomps before it's tossed into a field somewhere.  Wasteful? Maybe. But the fact that my pepper plant cost $1.49 which is comparable to the price of one pepper in the store leaves me pretty settled on that one.



Earlier this spring Eliza and I went to a nearby greenhouse to buy flowers for our bed.  I explained to the lady what I was looking for and then added, "plus my kids like to pick them so anything that makes a lot of flowers would be good!" She kind of shuttered and suffered a quick harmless heart attack then attempted a smile.  It was obvious to me kids probably didn't get to pick flowers at her house.  I'm sorry, does a flower have to be stared at and left alone to be beautiful?  Not in my book.  Does a cut flower have to be displayed in a vase untouched?  Not here.  I've seen some pretty spectacular mud pies wearing my snapdragons and petunias because here everybody gets to enjoy the garden.

 

 

This week our chickens decided to wander into the vegetable garden.  They helped themselves to a few tasty bites of spinach then kindly leveled the entire crop.  Meh. There's always something.  Whether it's rabbits, whistle pigs, potato bugs, chickens, or sprinting children.....there's always something threatening those precious crops.  I do what I can to keep up and when I can't keep up I just kind of give up and look forward to the next thing growing.  Then I pour a glass of wine and enjoy it sanity intact.  And that's how we garden with children.