How our vegetable garden is supporting our healthy eating habits, despite our best efforts to totally ignore it all summer.
So, we planted a garden this year.
I am using the term “garden” rather loosely. We have some potted herbs – cilantro, basil and parsley. In terms of vegetables, we have four tomato plants next to the porch and one zucchini plant behind some shrubs bordering the patio.
They’ve necessarily grown into pretty hardy little plants. With all of our travel this summer, our yard (and garden) received very limited attention.
Fortunately – in this case – we’ve had a fairly rainy summer. We certainly weren’t around to water anything.
Which is why I was rather surprised when the boys came running in from the yard two weeks ago, yelling. “Mom! Mom! You won’t believe what’s growing in the backyard.”
There is a bit of Chicken Little in me, so while I didn’t suspect a chunk of sky had fallen into the lilacs, I was kind of picturing a huge, mutant strain of poison ivy, wrapping itself around the patio furniture.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“LOOK.”
And there was my son, holding the biggest zucchini I had ever seen.
It was almost two feet long (no lie – I am including a photo to prove it.) And it had apparently grown in our garden.
Imagine that.
We were so excited, we took it on our family vacation. We fed eight people sautéed zucchini with just half of it.
It took my sons and I another week to finish off the other half.
Here’s the rub: While we haven’t seen another quite so impressive, we are continuing to harvest on an almost daily basis. There are half a dozen oversized zucchini in our refrigerator right now, awaiting our consumption.
My friend has since told me that zucchini are notoriously prolific plants, which is astonishing to me, given the limited supply (and meager proportions) of those we see in our local grocery store.
We can apparently expect a couple more weeks of fresh vegetables. Which in the case of this particular vegetable garden, means zucchini.
Sauteed zucchini. Grilled zucchini.
Zucchini parmesan (yes, it works like eggplant.) Zucchini bread.
Here is the good news: I’d written earlier in the season, about how kids are more willing to eat vegetables grown in their own garden. This continues to be true. I grow slightly dazed, watching my children eat all this zucchini.
Woohoo.
Next year, we will plant a wider variety of vegetables, in the hopes of getting the boys to broaden their healthy eating habits even further.
Now, if I can only find a good recipe for zucchini pie...
Related Posts:
I wrote about planting our vegetable garden in, “Let’s Get Dirty.”
For more tips to help your kids develop their own healthy eating habits, see “How to Get Your Kids Excited About Vegetables (Really!)”
Recommended Products:
For some great insight into the healing properties of vegetables and herbs, check our Rebecca Wood’s wonderful book, The New Whole Foods Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Resource for Healthy Living.
Rebecca is also the author of the Julia Child Cookbook Awards winner, The Splendid Grain.
Dare I say, both books are splendid.
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