Reaping the Rewards of Gardening

One of the ways I am dealing with my illness both physically and mentally is by keeping things around me alive, which has provided me with a purpose. I got the idea when I had lost all hope and was visiting my ailing friend Bill, who happens to be suffering with a Cancer Doctors have deemed Terminal. I watched Bill as he moved about his garden, and was amazed to see the various varieties of plants he had already established in his new garden.

His plants were so alive and Bill was happy to give me the various vegetables that no one in his household seemed to want. He was even happier when we turned the Roma Tomatoes he grew into a sauce that we used for various dishes. The joy we all received from the minimal effort it took to grow this food struck me to my core and made me want to pursue gardening full time.

While I will admit I wasn't able to grow the super garden I had hoped for this year (due to my inability to get a good tiller last spring and settling for a hand tiller instead), I am still reaping the rewards of my effort on a daily basis. That is no exaggeration either. I have more vegetables at times than we can eat and when I've given as many away as I can, they come back to me later as rotten vegetables, ready for the vermicompost system.

 Here are the vegetables we picked Saturday morning

The potatoes were given to me by a friend who had a bag rotting on his porch. He was going to throw them onto a field and just let them decompose into organic matter. I had other ideas and decided to cut off the moldy parts and plant what I could to see if anything would grow!

When I started seeing shoots of potato vines coming up out of the ground all over, I knew we'd been successful. My wife harvested a couple of the potatoes so we could have a breakfast burrito, yum! As you can see in the picture, we also harvested Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, jalapenos, green beans, broccoli, and a hybrid zucchini/squash. The potatoes take the longest to grow, everything else we harvest every few days, including okra which is almost daily, but not pictured.

We very much enjoy eating fresh vegetables without pesticides or other contaminates on them~