Growing Food and Kids

It’s the height of garden season, and every day there’s weeding, hoeing, harvesting and food preparation to be done. Along with work, parenting and everything else going on in the summertime, gardening can become a chore.

Case in point: last Tuesday. My husband was out of town and I took the day off work to take my kids to visit friends on Smith Lake. When we got home close to 8 p.m. after a day of swimming, boating and jetskiing, both boys were sound asleep and I wished I was too. After missing a day’s work, I needed to spend the evening at the computer. But the garden was calling — loudly. I picked quickly, racing the sunset, and came in with quite a harvest.

There were small piles of cucumbers and yellow squash, a handful of green beans, a bunch of peppers (cayenne and jalapeno), and one lone zucchini squash. But I was too tired to deal with it all, even though I knew the piles would grow bigger the next day, eventually taking over my kitchen if I didn’t watch out.

On days like last Tuesday (which come fairly often when you’re growing food, raising kids, and trying to have a life too), it’s easy to see why most people just buy their food at Wal-Mart and forget about it. But if you keep at it, you can reap the rewards of fresh, healthy food for your family all year long. And if you don’t, you’ll end up wasting a lot of really good food. Here are my tips to avoid getting overwhelmed:

• Set a schedule. Maybe it’s gardening in the morning, working in the afternoon. Or vice versa. But have some sort of plan for your day to make sure you get everything done. About.com Small Farms Guide Lauren Ware says when her work day is done, she heads outside for garden work. “Often, I get up extra early to do some work outdoors before writing as well,” she says.
• Make food plans in advance. Rather than looking at a pile of fresh vegetables and blankly wondering how to use them, determine in advance your goals for each of the plants in your garden. For instance, I serve cucumbers in salads or other recipes as they ripen, but I also knew that I wanted to use many of them to make dill pickles. A pile like this one was perfect for pickle-making.
• Allow yourself to break ‘the rules.’ If you read the Ball Blue Book or another respected tome on gardening or preserving food, it’ll tell you to prepare or preserve your produce as soon as it’s picked, or at least on the same day it’s picked. While I know fresh is best, sleep is sometimes more important. To keep my sanity last Tuesday, I blanched and froze the squash that evening but waited another 24 hours to pickle the cucumbers. And they were just fine. Sometimes stretching the accepted “rules” is the only way to keep your sanity.

So how do you keep your head when the garden starts getting overwhelming? Please share your strategies in the comments section below.