Well for my 9th birthday my very eccentric grandfather gave me the top cut off a carrot and a few potato eyes and told me ‘to watch them grow.’

Needless to say I would’ve prefered a new Barbie.

Comment by taryn on 2/21/2008 @ 7:02 am

Hi! Both of my parents were big time gardeners. They planted all types of flowers and had 2 vegetable gardens. My 89 year dad has told me this story over and over. When I was young, he and I were outside. He was weeding and I was just hanging around him! All of a sudden I said to my dad, “Hey, look at this big fishing worm!” Dad turned around and I was holding a “garter”
snake! Thanks,Cindi

Comment by Cindi Hoppes on 2/21/2008 @ 8:48 am

I never had a green thumb until my 6th grade teacher made our spring project: growing tomato plants. I’d love the chance to win this piece of garden, too.

Thanks.

Comment by Katie on 2/21/2008 @ 9:19 am

when I was about 7 or 8 we lived in an apartment so we didn’t have a garden of our own… so when we would go to visit my grandparents they would tell me that their garden was mine. They would let me water it and plant stuff and whatnot and then the day before I would leave I could pick some of the produce. This one time I picked a seriously giant carrot and I was SO proud of myself for growing such a beauty. My grandparents let me believe it was my doing but since I was only there for about 2 weeks of the growing season I now know it really had nothing to do with me!

Comment by Tara on 2/21/2008 @ 10:50 am

This is a re-post for me, but appropriate, although it’s my son’s childhood, not mine: When my younger son was small, I came home one day and there on the table was a wild flower that he’d picked and potted in some dirt. This came along with a piece of paper with, “I love you, Mom” written in pencil in his little-boy printing. Of course the flower didn’t grow in the dirt, but today it’s pressed in some wax paper with the note attached and sits on my dresser where I see it every day. He’s grown, and I’m sure has no memory of this act, but it’s one of my favorite things ever.

Comment by Marilyn on 2/21/2008 @ 11:14 am

My nephew when he was 3 years old wanted to plant a garden. So we planted a sunflower garden. He would water them daily and keep the dirt clean (weeds). As the flowers started to grow it was not long before they were twice as tall as him. He said it was like jack and the bean stalk.

Comment by Rita on 2/21/2008 @ 11:29 am

My mother has always had a garden in our backyard. It includes tomatoes, lettuce, rhubarb, and other plants and veggies. We also have a sizable strawberry patch in the garden (to which I contributed with one of my science projects). However, my story isn’t with the garden but with the mulberry tree out at my Dad’s farm. Dad’s farm came to him through a bequest from a friend of the family. It has a wonderful yard that was just perfect for playing softball and other games as kids. However, there was one danger point (in my mother’s eyes). In the far corner of the yard is a mulberry tree. For those of you who don’t know mulberries, they are wonderfully sweet and tasty black berries that grow on a very big tree. The juice is very good and also stains VERY WELL. When we would play in the yard, we would always make sure to make “detours” over to the mulberry tree so we could grab a couple of berries and eat them on the run. The main problem (again, to my mother’s eyes, not ours!) arose when we would slide around the tree and get mulberry juice stains on our clothes. Those stains would never come out so we always had to wear our “farm clothes” out to Dad’s farm. Not that we minded, but Mom always checked! The tree is still there but I’m not sure if the berries are quite as numerous now as they were when we were young and thought it was a vast cornucopia of berries.

Comment by Minette on 2/21/2008 @ 11:36 am

There is a large painting of my grandma’s garden in the 1950’s painted by my Dad. It is still hanging at my Mom’s house today. My Dad wanted to show his Mother’s work of art by creating a painting of the many flowers she grew and weaved between the vegetable plants.

Her garden was on the family farm near Traverse City, Michigan where they lived for 60 years. It shows my grandma’s love of gardening and our family’s memory of that special place.

My Dad captured the vibrant colors of that garden perfectly. Also included in the painting is my younger brother Raymond playing in that garden at a young age.

Since I lost my brother many years ago when he was only 16 and last year I lost my Dad, that painting of that special place on earth is my favorite memory.

It makes me remember how gardening can show God’s love.

Comment by John Charles on 2/21/2008 @ 11:40 am

What a cute plant!
When we were kids we used to take all the seeds from our fruit and plant them behind our house, sure they would grow, eagerly checking them every hour or so after they were planted. Needless to say, nothing ever sprouted.
My kids have taken to the same logic - if it is a seed it must grow something. They planted hundreds of seeds (I don’t know what they were from) in a campground’s dirt parking spot two summers ago. When we went back to camp last summer they were sure they would find little trees growing everywhere. They were so sure there would be little plants that they were adamant that we were at the wrong camp spot, and eventually the wrong campground.
We love our plants so much that we have names for them so my kids were very disappointed that their little seeds didn’t produce anything.

Thanks for the great giveaway!

Comment by Melynda on 2/21/2008 @ 11:40 am

Good Southwestern WI garden memories. My aunt lived next door and her garden was HUGE. My mom, aunt and I would shuck corn together (I was 7 or so, so I shucked until I got bored..) but I remember eating peas from the garden. They tasted warm and sweet and full of summer. Summer? What’s that??? Only a memory at this point in Februrary!!

Comment by Maria on 2/21/2008 @ 11:49 am

I looked forward to our garden as a child. It took up a third of the backyard and was perfect for grazing.

Comment by Bebemiqui on 2/21/2008 @ 1:04 pm

My mother had a green thumb — and our house growing up was filled with plants ~~ this is where the seed of my own love of plants must have been planted. I love all types of plants, flowers and trees and live surronded by them!

Comment by Johannah Brookwell on 2/21/2008 @ 1:15 pm

One of my fondest childhood memories would have to when we would go up into the mountains and along the trails my mother would pick us honeysuckle and we “suck” the sweet juices from the stem, ahhh just the scent of honeysuckle brings back memories!!

Comment by Jennifer on 2/21/2008 @ 1:51 pm

When the lilacs would bloom in Spring my sisters and I would go pluck off flowers to taste their sweetness. Now my kids taste and smell the lilacs from our neighbors next door. Is it Spring yet?

Comment by Anne on 2/21/2008 @ 2:15 pm

I don’t know why, but this memory really sticks with me. We were very poor and we didn’t have a house or a garden but I remember my brother and I finding what we thought was a bag of garbage left at the back door to our housing unit when we came home from school one day. We immediately thought we’d be helpful to my mom and throw it in the garbage for her.

Later that night my mom was looking for the bag of rhubarb a friend had droppped of for her. We’d never seen or heard of rhubarb! We were pretty embarrassed and I always think of that day when I see rhubarb.

Comment by Judith Greenberg on 2/21/2008 @ 3:37 pm

As a child of the 1950’s, we had to make our fun. There was a flowering plant in the garden that we called “pop-pops”. So named because we took the egg-shaped fruit and threw them hard onto the sidewalk. They made this wonderful, quaint “POP!”, if thrown with force and precision. Much later I learned that it was actually called a passion flower. For a complete history behind it’s name, uses, and types. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passiflora_incarnata

Today in re-reading about this beautiful purple flower that gave us such a joyous childish thrill, I found that the genus of the one in our garden was actually called a Maypop. Some botonists may think that was because the flower bloomed in May…but I know better. “POP!”

Marilyn

Comment by Marilyn Kinsella on 2/21/2008 @ 4:00 pm

I saw this afternoon that my neighbor’s irises are starting to bloom. These are my favorite flower because we had a bunch of purple irises that grew around our mailbox when I was growing up. Every Memorial Day we would cut a huge bouquet and take them to my Grandmother’s grave. She died when I was three, so I don’t have any memories of her. But everytime I heard stories about her, I imagined she was wearing purple.

Comment by Becca on 2/21/2008 @ 9:43 pm

I remember going to a strawberry orchard. We spent the whole day as a family picking delicious strawberries. Now, these were not just ordinary strawberries, they were HUGE! I got to climb around in these plants and pick the strawberries; we even got to eat some while we were picking them (although I don’t think we were supposed to do that). It was such a great bonding experience for our family. We even tried to have friendly competitions between me and my sister for who can pick the biggest, sweetest and most.

We left that day with a trunk full of strawberries and wonderful memories. Although, I think my sister and I slept the whole way back…

Comment by Brian on 2/22/2008 @ 10:53 am