Little Gardener

We planted a garden this summer and Nathan was an excellent helper for all the garden duties. Almost every day during Sarah's morning nap we would head outside to water the plants in the garden and the flowers in the front beds. Nathan had his little watering can and was always very opinionated about how the watering should be done.

Nathan watering "his" pepper plant early in the summer.

He adopted two of the plants in the front flower bed and one of the pepper plants in the garden as "his". Every day the first few weeks he would always remind (command?) me, "Mommy, don't water mines!" But since his aim with his watering can usually left a lot to be desired, I would have to water his plants while he wasn't looking. And if I got caught he would be pretty annoyed with me. Finally, after weeks and weeks of this struggle, we came to an agreement that Mommy could "help water mines" most days.

In the garden we planted four tomato plants, four basil plants and two pepper plants. We didn't get anything from the pepper plants, two of the basil plants died, one of the tomato plants got bottom rot on most of the tomatoes and then the heat did a number on the rest of them. But we still got a decent yield of tomatoes and it was Nathan's FAVORITE job to pick the tomatoes. In the picture below you can see him carefully picking off the leaves at the top of the tomato, which he always called a "scab" for some reason. But he was of the opinion that tomatoes were not allowed to come into the house if they had the "scab" on them!

Early in the season, Brian and I told Nathan that he couldn't pick tomatoes without us there to help him. But he couldn't help himself sometimes and would come find me with his hands and/or pockets FULL of tomatoes. Almost always he did a great job of only picking the ripe tomatoes, so finally we gave him free reign to pick when he wanted to (since he was basically doing that anyway and it wasn't a battle that I really wanted to fight).

After getting wet feet lots of times while watering, by the end of the summer Nathan's rain boots became a popular footwear choice for gardening.

A pocket full of tomatoes!

Occasionally Nathan would want to eat a tomato straight from the garden, just biting into it like an apple!  But mostly I used them to make pasta sauce.  I will definitely have fond memories of gardening with Nathan at this house!