Thieves In the Garden



The boys playing on the "trolley"  at Honeymom's and Grandpa's

When my boys were little, my wife taught them to love raw veggies.  She'd set broccoli, peas and cauliflower on their high chair tray and pour a little puddle of ranch dressing beside them. They were at that fiercely independent stage where they didn't want to be fed anymore. They wanted to do it themselves.

My wife, a scathingly brilliant educator where it came to getting children to do what she wanted, came up with this little ruse to get our kids to eat things they would normally have resisted. People at restaurants would marvel that we could get two and three year olds to eat raw veggies.

Honeymama, who recieved her nickname from her grandkids, planted a garden every year. My grandpa plowed up the ground, dug the rows and together they planted vegetables every year. They started in January with the English peas - two or three rows of them.   My grandmother for the longest time thought she had racooons because she kept finding all these empty pea pods when she went to pick peas.

It wasn't coons.



My Grandmother

Whenever we came out to visit, the boys always loved ot go out and play in the backyard. My grandpa had built a swing and a zip line trolley made from a pulley and a steel cable strung from the top of an oak tree to the bottom of another one. They also liked to poke around the barn and climb on the cow pen fences.  Turns out they were also sneaking out into the garden.

They would sit between the rows of English peas where we couldn't see them and strip young sweet peas right out of the pods. Inevitably, they got so busy snitching peas, they didn't hear my grandmother come out the back door.

She saw what was happening and slipped back in the house, calling us to the window.  There, out in the garden, were our offspring crawling around amongst the peas, their heads bobbing up and down like a pair of cows grazing in a pasture. I was all set to rush out there and punish them, but Honeymama told me to leave them alone. She kind of got a kick out of them sneaking around eating raw peas, I think, even if it did reduce the size of her pea harvest..

Her solution?  Every season after that she just planted an extra row of peas for the boys.

There's a lot of Godly wisdom in that somehow..

Tom King - (c) 2012