How to Make Gardening Fun - lessons learned from a four year old

Sometimes I feel like our garden gets overwhelming. The weeds get out of control, some of the plants don't "keep" in the garden and you have to keep up with picking every day. It is great to have fresh food from the garden every day for supper but the extra time for harvest and processing to keep for the winter can get to be drudgery.

Just look at all those weeds! The about to give up pea plants are in the back of the photo below. In the foreground there are parsnips, carrots, and beets. There are a few more rows to my right. This is one of five garden spaces that we have this year.

Here are  Little Miss P's tips to make gardening fun:

1. Wear tights to the garden so the bugs don't bite your legs.
2. Plant picking flowers so that you don't get in trouble for picking flowers in the yard.
3. Take good care of your flowers. You have to dust them with garden dirt and then fluff them with a bit of grass.

4. Use the proper kitchen utensils. This makes the pea shelling REALLY fun. Make sure you have a spoon that is just the right size for ONE pea so that snacking while you work is enjoyable.

5. Plant pink food. It is always fun to have pink food on your plate. Beets are fun because they also turn rice and noodles pink when they are on your plate together.
(I think I weeded most of that light pink variety out thinking they were the radishes that we planted with the beets to mark the row. I pulled a "radish" the other day that I thought I had missed. I bit into it and--- it was a beet. Too bad.)