(Photo: Markus Spiske/Unsplash)
COVID has made grocery shopping quite the hassle. So my family decided to try to start our own vegetable garden. And it turns out, it was much harder than we thought.
My family and I had high hopes for our garden. We spent one weekend together in our yard digging up dirt, pulling weeds and planting seeds like lettuce, tomatoes and carrots. After that, we all took turns watering and weeding our garden every few days. But a month later, half of our vegetables were eaten by gophers and most of them just didn’t make it.
So, lesson learned. It’s not so easy to grow your own food. I have much more appreciation for the way food is grown now. Although our first attempt didn’t go too well, we’re starting over and trying again because the experience was priceless.
Gardening allowed us to reconnect as a family. While tending to the garden, we’ve been catching up on each other’s lives, helping each other with physically demanding tasks, and bonding in ways we really never have before. I look forward to continuing to bond with my family through activities like these after quarantine and I hope to one day enjoy fresh vegetables grown in my own garden.