Kathleen's Veggie Garden Update

Since everyone's pulling for us to succeed in our first-ever raised bed veggie garden at the Eagles' nest, celebrate with us our first green pepper, picked last week.

Can you tell my granddaughter loves green peppers? She eats them like apples. She's been watching this one eagerly. We'd just finished up a painting project (that's one of my old shirts) and we'd been talking about starting supper. I was wondering what happened to the promise of help cleaning up the brushes when I heard, "Nana! Look! It's ready!"

This is the beauty of having the raised bed so close to the kitchen door. In the old days women planted conveniently located kitchen gardens. Mostly the small stuff. Not only is it easy to care for this way, but it's so much fun to watch it grow. You can take a turn around the garden several times a day, nip off the sucker shoots on the tomato plants, prop up

a drooping branch, pluck a few weeds, and it's not a chore. It's an outing.

Here's two weeks' growth on the tomatoes. Left, 3 weeks ago. Right, last week. One of Clyde's objections to tomatoes is the wire cages. I don't like them either. We started out with metal supports we found in the garage--old window screen frames. We added bamboo U-shape supports later, but lately I've been plugging in simple bamboo poles

as needed to lift a heavy branch. I use the green velcro garden tape to attach--great stuff! You can actually re-use it. I like this more natural approach. We'll see how it holds up under the growing weight.

Oh, yeah, we just lost another tooth.

And look, Grampa! We're growing tomatoes!

One more aspect of ownership for the kids--we ordered the pepper and tomato plants through one of their school fundraisers.

Amazing how much you can get into a raised bed. I have visions of my sugarplums thinking of Nana as they tend their own gardens someday. I have lots of wonderful garden memories. Like my parents, I did the whole soup to nuts--er, salad greens to sweet corn garden in my salad days, but now it's mainly about tomatoes. Daddy always found a spot in the yard for a few tomato plants. For the sake of education and experimentation we're doing a little of this and that as space permits.

Do you have garden memories?