08 Mar 2013 | 9:54 PM PST | Posted by Tricia Fawkes | Category: Kids
Whe our first child was born (D), we lived in Port McNeill. Our home was a small appartment above the Sea Soil bagging facility in an industrial area. At this point in my life I knew that I loved to garden and I had been inspired by the previous four years of working in garden centres doing Sea Soil demos as well as attending many amazing garden shows as a vendor. I had only kept a few plants in pots and few small planter gardens at the point, nothing major but I did take a keen interest in what I was doing. When I was pregnant with D I decided that motherhood would be a little "uneventfull" and if I couldn't continue working full time at Sea Soil, I would make a job that I could bring D to work with me. That is were I came up with the idea of opening a small garden centre. It was a fun place for me to meet people and gain a tonne of plant knowledge. My educational background is in Bussiness not Horticulture but this idea gave me a chance to merge a hobby with my training. I was very pregnant my first season at The Elegant Eggplant Garden Market and managed to close shop just in time to have D (he was born in late July). The following season I wore him in a sling and when he grew tire of that I placed D in an old tin wash bucket with some trucks and shovels. His first year and a half was spent climbing, digging, knocking plants over and getting dirty.......nothing has changed 8 years later.
Just before D was 2 we moved to Nanaimo and were lucky enough to build a small house on a super small city lot. I loved that house, it was me inside and out. The yard was cute and tiny but I packed it with all the sad leftovers from my garden centre, smothering them in Sea Soil and love......hoping that some of them would make it!!! D was always a picky eater and I worked hard introducing different types of food but at 2 he refused to eat most vegetables. He loved rice, bread, ham, cheese and most fruit (probably still his favorites). I found this really frustrating but instead of fighting with him I put my little worker in the garden and taught him to grow his own food.
I soon discovered that anything we grew he ate. To this day his favorite veggies are lettuce, cucumbers, peas and brocolli (the first veggies he grew). He would eat things right out of the garden and loved knowing that this was something that he made for himself. The funny thing was that when summer ended I had to convince him that the veggies in the freezer or fridge were still from his garden in order to keep him eating vegetables.
One year we came back from the local Seedy Saturday with some seeds. D came home with a special package that a vendor had given him but he wouldnt tell me what they were. He said that he wanted to be sneeky and plant them in the garden and let his "magic bean seeds" grow. I really thought nothing of it other than it was cute, I mean what were the chances of his seeds really growing without being started indoors. He was 4 at the time so I didnt even think he would remember to cover the seeds with soil. To my surprise this was what happened (see below). Two plants in my front yard tangled amongst shrubs and trees, spilling out onto the driveway. While the reality is that front yard contained a massive amount of fertile Sea Soil and we irrigated it well but to D he was a genious!!! Not to mention he actually ate butternut squash!! Today the yard has grown and we now have three kids but they are still eating what they grow and working hard in the yard.
