Harvest time with the "reluctant farmer"

I started out the summer as a reluctant farmer, then was elated to share that we had grown snow peas. The summer season of growing has been eye-opening for our family. We've all shared in the joy of watering, picking and eating ripe fruits and veggies. All told, we grew and nurtured: sunflowers, strawberries, blueberries, snow peas, basil, green beans and tomatoes. Boy, I fretted over my green beans. They just kept growing and growing, with nary a flower. Apparently, my beans were of the "Jack and the Beanstalk" variety. They climbed to the sky. They wrapped themselves up and down my bean poles. They climbed up the water meter, the sunflowers and the nearby rose bushes. Then one day, lo and behold, flowers were everywhere. My 3-year-old and I just picked a big bag full of green beans yesterday. We've going to cook them for dinner tonight. It's been exciting and rewarding to grow our own food. It's really taught my kids about the seasons, and what the sun and water does for plants.

It's also been eye-opening to realize there's many ways to grow a garden. I had an old-fashioned notion of rows of plants, in a rectangular plot. And that was the only way to do vegetables. Or, that if you were going to have an ornamental garden with annuals aplenty, then that was that. You limit yourself to flowering ornamentals. I went through a phase where I feared that we didn't have enough natives in my yard (how could I be a self-respecting EnviroMom with so few native plants??). Now that we've reaped what we've sown, we've learned there are no wrong ways to garden. And that natives, annuals and food-bearing plants can all co-habitate nicely, without being restricted to orderly rows, and that's it's beneficial to have pretty flowers bringing the bees and butterflies. It all has a purpose.

What did you learn from your garden this summer?