Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I was always surrounded by the beauty of the outdoors. From Mt. Hood, to the Columbia River Gorge, to the Oregon coast there was always some amazing nature around me. But even with all of these extraordinary sights to behold, the one clear vision I still have of my youth is of our backyard on Thompson Court. At the time it seemed like the biggest and best backyard anyone could ever have with its large lawn and pine trees, fruit trees we grew from little saplings, more raspberry and blackberry bushes then it seemed we could ever finish picking, and a lovely little vegetable garden. It wasn’t just the plants themselves that stir the memories, it’s the time I spent with my family mowing the lawn and tending the garden, it’s the harvesting of the fruits and vegetables to have them go right on the dinner table that night, it’s a vision of my mother canning and preserving for our family’s food storage. Somehow, these are the memories that my mind has embedded as the vision of my childhood, and as over-simplified and idealized as I know this vision is, I love and cherish it.

With this vision in mind, this spring I set out to create a garden for my family. We live in an older neighborhood and the home we moved into four years ago has a yard that was well cared for many years ago, but over the years has become crowded with overgrown trees and bushes. Don’t get me wrong, part of the reason we settled in this neighborhood is because we love the mature landscape with trees towering over the rooftops, but as things stood there was little room to add anything to our yard, let alone a garden.

So in order to make room for our garden, out came the loppers and clippers and after many hours of cutting, digging out roots, and hauling it all away we were left with some open space alongside our long driveway in the front yard. The next few Saturdays were spent tearing out sod, terracing (our yard is on a hill), removing large rocks, building four by four foot grow boxes, mixing our soil with some supplemental soil and best of all planting seeds. Then came the hard work . . . waiting.

After we planted and all of the labor that went into getting the garden ready I lay in bed that night wondering what would happen. I had convinced my young children that the many Saturdays spent working on the garden would be worth the effort when we started to see our garden grow into big healthy plants that made our yard beautiful. I also told them there was nothing better then picking fruit and vegetables you grew yourself, but what if nothing happened? What if those tiny little seeds we buried in the earth didn’t grow? What if we buried them to deep or too shallow? What if we over-watered or under-watered? What if our soil was too acidic, too rocky, too full of weeds? There were countless “what ifs” floating through my head and I felt sure that our little experiment was doomed as was my dream of recapturing some of the joy of my childhood for my own children. What a waste.

Still, every day I’d watch and wait, knowing full-well that whether or not the seeds were germinating, we wouldn’t see sight of them for days, even weeks in some cases. Then, not too many days later, the radishes fanned my small flicker of hope into a bonfire of surety as their tiny leaves peeked through the soil. This set off what seemed to be a chain reaction of garden growth over the next couple of weeks as all five garden boxes saw seeds become tiny seedlings. Within a month we began harvesting radishes, strawberries, basil, sage, rosemary, and cilantro, a few weeks after that the peas and zucchini started coming in bunches, in the next week or two we’ll have fresh green beans, tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, carrots, green peppers, jalapenos, and cantaloupe, and growing nicely toward an autumn harvest are the butternut squash and pumpkins. Every day we go out to the garden it seems there is something new to see or harvest. It truly is a miracle to watch a little bit of work turn into such a beautiful thing.

So why am I telling you about our adventures in gardening? To brag about our success? No . . . (OK, maybe a little). To encourage you to become a gardener? Not really, although it’s not nearly as hard as I thought it would be and the rewards are even greater as an adult then they were as a child. Really my purpose for recounting this is to remind each of us that when it comes to parenting we have to make an effort every single day, especially on the days when we really don’t feel like it or we’re afraid of how things might turn out. Just like gardening, most of us don’t start the process of parenting with a great deal of experience or education in the pursuit, but if we work hard at it, learn from our mistakes, and give an effort every single day the fruits of our labor are beyond our wildest dreams.