Veggie Tales - Part 1

A few weeks ago, May 5th to be exact, I took Carter and Griffin outside and formally introduced them to Dirt. They had actually met Dirt before and had found him to be quite compelling. After all, he's able to do a lot of nifty things; fills dump trucks, lets them drive right over him, mixed with water makes MUD. In their minds he pretty much had already cornered the market on stuff to do outdoors. But this time I had much higher aspirations for Dirt.

Earlier in the week, Jeff had painstakingly tilled 400lbs of compost, 10lbs of lime, and a bucket of fertilizer into our 200 square foot plot of rocky, North Carolina clay. What a guy. I should really dedicate an entire post to his good naturedness, especially when it comes to his industrious wife and our little piece of the earth. A couple more years and he will have tilled every square inch of it. And then I fear we'll be forced to move because we simply won't be able to dig out from under all the toys anymore. But I digress. I hoed it into rows -which one might think is unnecessary and ridiculously Type A of me, but when you have two small, eager children gardening with you, it is of paramount importance that you delineate the working Dirt from the roads, so to speak.

Then I got Carter out there with the biggest seeds I could find...sweet corn.

You can see that he was very serious about his work. This because he likes Dirt and Corn and the thought that Dirt could help make Corn grow was, well, not nearly as interesting as his mother thought it should be, but at least I wasn't on my knees planting that particular row. We planted corn, sunflowers, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe and watermelon - the commonality being plants that get to be HUGE...theoretically. It's mandatory that the produce in your first gardening experience be inspiring, especially when your mom is going to make you spend a LOT of time watering and weeding. But you can see from the picture that even with all of our amendments, Dirt is still quite pitiful, so I had little hope that anything would sprout.

But two short weeks later Dirt came through...

Carter's CORN is actually GROWING! And in a bonafide row, which is equally amazing!

And so are Griffin's cantaloupe plants, but it's still kind of touch and go with them. Perhaps he mangled them with that little spade.

Stay posted for more Dirty summer miracles to come...