A few weeks ago, I gave you some ideas about gardening with kids, and I mentioned that my son, who is 5, is an enthusiastic veggie gardener. While our garden this year did not live up to his (extremely grand) vision, he does love taking care of our veggie containers and watching their progress. We’ve got the basics: a couple kinds of tomatoes, several varieties of peppers, strawberries, and my favorites from the garden, cucumbers. He’s been faithfully counting the number of flowers and developing fruit for weeks.
After I came home yesterday from several days of traveling for work, he took me out to inspect our containers: “Mom, come see! There’s a cucumber that’s ready and it looks delicious!” (This is a direct quote. I promise I didn’t make up the “delicious” part.)
One of the things that makes cucumbers fun to grow with kids is that the big leaves and fast growth often hide the fruit, so you have to go on a bit of an exploration – even with just a couple plants in a big pot – to find the ones that are ripe. Upon careful examination – and lots of “oohing” and “aahing” over the great job he and his dad did taking care of the plants while I was gone – we found that we had not one, but two cucumbers ready to harvest. To commemorate our first official veggie harvest of the season, I took a photo of my very proud son with his first two cucumbers. After a day of chilling in our fridge (they are best cold!), they’re on tonight’s dinner menu … and all of us are ready to dig in!
What have you harvested so far this season, and do you (or your kids) have any favorites?