Eat Your Veggies

Like most mothers, mine always told me to eat my vegetables.   Can’t say I always liked what I was served, but I did learn to eat vegetables from an early age and to this day I have an uncommon appreciation for them.   It helps if they are prepared properly because they taste so much better.   We had a vegetable garden in the backyard when I was a kid.   It was fun reading about the fruits and vegetables we would grow and learning about the art of gardening.   My dad didn’t want to use pesticides, so we looked for alternatives such as growing marigolds to get rid of garden pests.   One year he even ordered a praying mantis which my brother and I always looked for in the garden.   Praying mantis like eating other insects.

Nowadays there’s a lot of discussion about organic plant matter and how it’s better to buy organic fruits and vegetables.   I can’t say I really understand all the fuss about organic stuff.   It seems to me if it grows in the ground then it is organic.   I do know that it is important that you get your seeds from good plants.   Healthy seeds and healthy soil produce better fruit and vegetables.   There’s an allegory for our lives in that statement.

My grandparents had a huge vegetable garden on their cattle farm outside of Springfield, Missouri.   I remember one summer when we went to visit my grandmother made the entire dinner from the produce of their farm.   The chicken was killed that morning and the vegetables were picked right from the garden hours before we ate them.   Even dessert, zucchini bread, came from the garden.   My grandmother was a good cook and my grandfather was good at growing vegetables & other rustic things like killing chickens and hunting game.   Oh the memories…