Growing up in Southern California, my experience with productive vegetable gardens is a bit lacking. We had citrus trees, fruit trees and jam was made in abundance. One year when I was ‘The Teen’, my mother decided we needed a vegetable garden and corralled us to all help and it was a hot day. I really only remember two things about this:
1. The gigantic water fight we got into while building the garden, complete with water hoses and a secret attack on the vegetable garden designer herself.
2. The sight of my father pushing a wheel barrow. Our Dad, the Pajama King Salesman of the West, hey, somebody has to sell pajamas or the entire world would sleep naked, and he was a very, very good pajama salesman. Men’s pajamas as well, so we (except my Mother) all grew up sleeping in pajamas with fly’s, whether we needed the fly’s or not! Dad grew up in New York City, and did not really do yard work, seeing him behind the wheel barrow was a unique event.
I do not remember this garden producing anything anyone actually wanted to eat.
Southern California vegetable garden number two was my idea, as I was now ‘the mother’ and decided we needed a productive vegetable garden. I put it in a year before meeting My Loving Spouse, with the help of a friend who owned her own rototiller (still very impressive thing for So. California) and my own set of ‘teens’. We laid out a beautiful vegetable garden, intermixed with flowers, a dwarf lime tree called The Bartender’s Friend (which did not end up to be my friend as it produced ZERO limes), sun flowers, tomatoes, herbs and other edibles. It did, just okay. Actually the tomatoes did do well. They were wonderful, tasty, yellow, cherry sized delights and by then I’d met My Loving Spouse and he hated them.
So, do we have the most amazing vegetable garden in Ellensburg?
Surely, NOT.
Do we have the most amazing vegetable garden in my history?
Absolutely!
And yes….
fresh tastes better,
much, much better!
Well done you Ellen, I can almost taste them! Sx