Ella's and My Harvest

The joy of gardening is completely lost on Cal -- he has zero interest in caring for plants and flowers in our yard and zero patience to watch them grow over time.  Sure, he talks a good game, wanting to plant the few seeds from his apple and grow a tree in our backyard; but one day after planting the seed in my brain to actually attempt this, he's no longer interested.  Meanwhile, I have 8 seeds drying in a wadded up paper towel and shoved into a shot glass waiting for me to mix them in some peat moss, put them in a ziplock bag and shove them in the back of the pantry for six weeks... at least, that's what I think I read as the next step.  I'll have to check because while Cal has lost interest in the project, I have not.

But Ella... Ella loves to garden... or maybe loves to help me garden... or maybe a little of both, I'm not sure, and, really, I don't care.  Whatever it is that gets her out there with me, I'll take and hope it sticks when she's on her own and I'm no longer there.  I think gardening is fantastic.

This past Sunday, it was a beautiful, sunny, slightly chilly afternoon.  I made my way to the cherry tomato plants still growing in the garden beds on the side of our deck.  These things are monsters and have been producing cherry tomatoes for many weeks now.  I had just started picking the red and orange ones when Ella joined me asking if she could help.  I hadn't really planned on picking, so I didn't have a bowl with me and asked her to run inside and ask Daddy for a bowl.  She did so and quickly returned with a good-sized one.  I threw the handfuls that I had already picked into the bowl and instructed her to look for red and orange -- not green -- tomatoes to pick and to go ahead and pick them.  We did.  Ella talked the entire time, of course; and as usual, I really don't remember what it was she said.  I just remember genuinely enjoying the time -- she listened really well to my instructions, and I just let her judge for herself if a tomato was ready to be picked.

We filled the bowl and didn't see any more red or orange tomatoes on the plants, so we moved to the "other" garden where I knew we had some kale to pick.  I grabbed a bag and some scissors, and we headed to the back corner of our yard.  The kale looked great; and next to it I saw the leaves of the carrots that Ella had seeded at school earlier in the summer.

"Ella, your carrots!!!  Let's pick your carrots!!!" I exclaimed, genuinely excited about the opportunity in front of us.  She was all in, of course.  Now, I've never grown carrots and know that that part of our yard still has a lot of clay despite it being my garden area for a few years now.  I figured these things were either completely shrivelled or just locked into the ground, never to emerge... never.  I gave the leaves a little tug; and when they didn't budge, I decided to run to the garage to get a shovel.

This turned out to be a good call.  With one scoop, I was able to dig up Ella's carrots -- a whole bunch of them -- which were small but still in tact and, from what I could tell, edible.

"Ellie!" I shouted.  "You grew these!  These are fantastic!"

She was smiling and talking (of course, I'm sure something about the carrots, but you never know).  I asked her if she wanted to carry them inside to show Daddy; and she asked me to carry the bunch still attached to the leaves and she'd carry the others that had fallen off.  So we shook the dirt off of the carrots we were each carrying and went inside to show Dan.  We were both smiling.  While inside, we threw them in a bowl; and then we returned to finish up our gardening "chores."

So I'm not sure the right way to get the kale leaves off of the plant, but my way is to cut the leaves off with scissors.  When Ella realized that I had scissors and she didn't, she ran inside to get her green, plastic, safe-for-kids scissors -- so sweet... she was being just like Mommy.

There were two rows of kale in a really tight garden bed, so I assigned us each a row -- she'd cut the leaves off of her row of kale, and I'd do the same with mine.  I showed her where to cut each leaf (as if I really knew) and instructed her to not cut the yellowed or "holey" leaves.  "They're icky," I said.  And away we went with our cutting.

Ella and our tomatoes, kale and carrots

So Ella is a rule stater -- once she hears one, it's stuck in her head and coming out her mouth as if she is the master of whatever it is that she's talking about.  Once she heard the rules for cutting these kale leaves off of the plants, she was tell me how to do it.  "Don't cut the yellow ones, Mommy" and "That one's icky so don't cut that one, Mommy."  Of course I pretended that I didn't know those rules, asked her for clarification (as in, "you mean don't cut THIS one?" as I held up the deadest leaf imaginable).

We were a great kale-cutting team and cut until our reusable shopping bag was full of kale leaves.  There were still some good leaves left on the kale plants, but the full bag seemed like enough for me to call it quits for the day.  We walked the bag back to the house where we showed Daddy and then laid our pickin's out on the table on the deck to take a picture of what I'd like to call our accomplishments.  These were all started from seeds mid-spring -- I enjoyed watching them grow and produce edible veggies and enjoyed even more that I could share it with my daughter.