By Renee Martinez, Founder of Raising Boys World
Since spring came early to our neck of the woods, we’ll be spending this weekend planning and working on our vegetable garden! We’ve always enjoyed growing a few veggies every summer and going to the farm to get the rest of the veggies we need, or pick fresh strawberries and blueberries.
For the past several years, we were members of a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). “Community Supported Agriculture consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. Typically, members or “share-holders” of the farm or garden pledge in advance to cover the anticipated costs of the farm operation and farmer’s salary. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s bounty throughout the growing season, as well as satisfaction gained from reconnecting to the land and participating directly in food production.”
We love our local CSA farm and every summer we would make the weekly 35-45 minute drive. Once we arrived, in addition to picking up our veggies for the week, we would go in the fields and pick whatever crops were ready for picking. It was fun and I honestly believe that this is one of the reasons my boys each veggies – willingly. They’ve grown up picking and eating and helping me clean and freeze or can them.
But I’m ready for a year off from the commitment of having to drive out to get everything. It’s also a financial commitment so I miss a week, I’m wasting money. What I’ve decided is to set up a garden that we can get a few items from, and when there are veggies at the farm we would like to pick, we can go and pay a fee to do so, and whatever I can’t grow, I can go to a local farmer’s market to buy on Saturday mornings.
To begin the process of planning my suburban garden I’ve decided to do a small compost. It’s been a good learning experience for the boys and not as challenging as I had previously thought. Since I didn’t want to spend money on a compost at this point (not knowing if I’ll do this again next year), I decided to use a big plastic garbage container as my place to compost. So far it’s working out.
Some good websites to reference are:
Composting and Gardening for Kids
I picked a location for our bigger garden and started to strip away the grass to make way for a small fenced in garden. Tonight the boys and I will make a list of what and where we will plant our veggies. They’re really excited.
Gardening is a wonderful hobby for anyone at any age. My experience with exposing gardening and farming to my boys (in addition to what I mentioned above) is that they also want to help me cook. They understand the process of how food gets to the table and know that it’s a lot of work.
I find very rewarding when it’s the middle of winter and I make some homemade sauce with tomatoes we picked in the summer. I’ll pull out a bag of frozen tomatoes and the boys always ask, “Are those tomatoes we picked?”.
About the Author: Renee Martinez is the mother of 4 boys, the founder of RaisingBoysWorld.com, www.socialmediabizsummit.com, and the president of RubyMarCom (www.rubymarcom.com), a boutique marketing communications company. Her business blog (www.lisac95.sg-host.com), provides resources on everything marketing and social media related for her active audience.
Renee is an adjunct professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY where she teaches social media marketing in the business school. Find Renee on Twitter at @reneemmartinez.
Photo of plants (and Renee’s headshot) by TBC Photo
