I came to gardening in what I should probably just go ahead and refer to as midlife, after we bought our first house and moved in in 2010, when I had a two year old and was pregnant with #2. As a child, we didn't grow anything much (although I do have vivid memories of making mud pies in bare dirt, so that's something!). As an adult, I was living in apartments and working fulltime. My husband meanwhile had spent 10 years jazzing up the bare dirt of his rented house, and one of his first romantic gestures was dropping off a bag of his homegrown tomatoes for me. Yet even after I moved in, I was too busy and uninterested.
That changed when we moved in our "own" home and I had a child to teach. I wanted him to understand where food came from, to eat vegetables, to be outside, to learn about science and math from nature as well as from books. My husband was completely occupied with landscaping the front of the house (another bare dirt situation) so the backyard became the fiefdom of me and the kids. I stopped paid work when my younger child was born, so even if I didn't have "free time", I was home more and could step outside without it being a big production.
The backyard was rototilled when we moved in (2010) and basic fill dirt added. Since then, I haven't added any significant new dirt to my 10x20' (approx.) patch. My summer priority is tomatoes. My year-round crops (okay, some months this is still aspirational) are lettuce and cilantro because I am a major cilantrohead. Everything else is added by whim, by accident, or by best-laid plan, and we know what happens to those. I do my best to grow without pesticides; I try to use organic seeds and starts but not exclusively. I care a lot about my plant-babies but some laziness creeps in; as my husband says with a shrug, "It's only plants. You can plant them again!" But you can't grow kids again, so my focus is more on the process than the product.
My older child's excitement and younger child's enthusiasm for gardening are awesome. Some days of course are better than others - this is true of any parenting effort! They usually enjoy being outside with me in the garden, and that's what's most important.
My lemon cucumber is looking beautiful, even if barren of fruit to date. I had one two years ago that produced sparsely and late; this one appears to be on the same track so maybe it's a climate problem. (A much better explanation than human error...) This year's model is potted, and previously I had it in the ground. The berries continue to do their thing. A bunch of sugar snaps are also ready to pick, but I'll leave them for daughter when she gets home from school today. They are the only green vegetable she will eat, and then only if she picks them herself and pops them in her mouth on the spot. The word picky really does not do her justice.
Taking advantage of some kid-free time, I also added some Miracle Gro to most of the vegetable plants. I didn't even know we had any, but my husband confessed it to me last night, with a nervous laugh. Hey, I like success as much as the next gardener. I hadn't fertilized anything, so undoubtedly they will enjoy this boost. I mixed it in a bucket that the kids usually use for their garden playtime, so this truly would not have been possible if they'd been at home. I also tied back most of the berry canes drooping into the walkway, and sowed a new round of cilantro and lettuce seeds in-ground adjacent to the Alliums of Mystery.
I have onion issues. I planted green onions from seed; in the past I've planted both onion sets as well as leek from seeds, and never have I successfully gotten what I thought I was going to get.
Every climate is different of course, and one benefit of my cooler, foggier one is that at least theoretically, I can grow lettuce from seed year-round. I put in some Salad Bowl and Winter seeds today in a pot, placed right next to where an earlier round of Salad Bowl did great and is just now winding down. Meanwhile, I had to discard the transplanted radishes that were started indoors from seed (so the kids could watch them). I think I waited too long to transplant them and they got irredeemably overgrown. I could probably start more radish seeds but... eh. Nobody really likes them so there's not a warm feeling of success when they do well and no hard feelings when they fail. I'd rather have a bit more emotion at stake in my dirt.
