How Stuff Works: Gardening

The Mother's Day 2010 "How Stuff Works" Series.
This is Post #1 of 4

How Stuff Works #1: Gardening

For Mother's Day we spent some quality family time making improvements to the jungle in our front yard that used to look like it was nicely landscaped.

For simplicity, let's just call that gardening.

We've never had a real garden so it makes sense that the kids don't have extensive hands-on experience with most gardening chores.

Sure, they know the basics such as pulling weeds, watering the flowers, trying not to touch slugs, screaming if you see a snake and running inside the house to hide if you happen to encounter a spider.

Anyway, on Mother's Day we did some family gardening and even brought home a number of potted plants from Lowe's to add a little color to the tamed jungle.

Mikayla confidently took on the role of Master Gardener.

Her goal was to plant two potted plants inside the barrel planters outside our garage.

While the rest of us were weeding, she dug a nice sized hole in the dirt within the barrel and planted one of the flowers before filling the dirt back in around the freshly planted flower.

Ready to move on to the second barrel, she asked us where the other flower was that she was supposed to plant.

We were both surprised and pleased with her willingness and get-it-done attitude, I asked of her "Wow, you've already planted the first one?"

She replied as expected with a happy "Yep!".

It was clear that she was feeling confident about doing such a good job with her assigned task. Probably she was only looking for a little confirmation and self-affirmation when she added: "I'm supposed to leave the flower in the pot, right?"

After a bit of grumbling under her breath she dug up all her hard work and then asked for some help extracting the flower from the pot before replanting it.



Thanks, family, for all your hard work out there!

We hope all you Mom's out there had a Happy Mother's Day!

Stay tuned for the next three Mother's Day 2010 "How Stuff Works" stories!

While you are waiting for those to show up, you might want to entertain yourself by reading (or re-reading) about The Mother Who Saved Mother's Day posting from last year.

~E