Little Grim and I have a vegetable garden this summer. It’s probably been about 20 years since I last did a veggie garden, I think. Early this year, I quit my more-than-full-time job as Client Services Manager to 750 Employer Accounts with United HealthCare, so that I could work from home doing client management work for Brother-in-law Grim and spend more time with Little Grim. We pulled her out of daycare and she is home with me two days a week while I am working, and she spends two other days with Grandma and Pop-pop Grim. On the 5th day, we hang out together, just the two of us.
One of our ‘together’ projects this summer was our garden. Our garden was a labor of love. Grimjack did the manly tilling, and Little Grim helped dig and mulch and plant and water. She helped plant seeds, and we watched our seedlings grow in the early spring indoors. Her and I have checked the garden together every single day of the summer since May, to watch things grow, and pick our vegetables. We mixed up a few seedlings and had to wait to see what eventually grew, since we couldn’t remember what was what. Our watermelon turned out to be a pumpkin. To a seasoned gardener, that would be a no-brainer, but we are novices and enjoyed our mistakes as much as the rest.
Little Grim thought it would be fun to feed tomatoes to the Canine, since she doesn’t like them much herself. So she’d pick, then pass them off to the dog when I wasn’t looking. The canine then interpreted that to mean she could pluck them off the vines herself to play with (since she won’t eat them either). So I would find green tomatoes laying around the yard with doggie teeth marks in them.
On hot days, I’d pretend to miss the plants when watering, and get her wet instead. She’d squeal in delight and run. No matter how many times I do that, it never fails to make her laugh.
This year, I tried 8 different varieties of tomatoes, string beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, watermelon, and some jalapeños and sweet peppers. Grimjack accidentally ran over the onions with the lawn mower early on, so no fresh onions. The garlic didn’t come up.
I will miss the garden when the season is over, not because of what we ate, but because of how much joy it has given us. I hope the little one will miss it too…..
2 comments:
Grimjack does some manly tilling at Man's Weekend too.
I'm thinking I'm gonna get to see God Daughter Grim when she drives to my house. It's been ages.
I know, we need to get together. I had hoped the Hockey draft would be at Casa de Deathlok, but no luck.
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