The Garden Grows with Us

by Richard S. Kordesh

She’s helped to plant the garden, she’s harvested from its beds, and now our daughter, Kathy, has requested flowers from the garden for her wedding next year.

Which flowers we provide will depend in part on when in 2015 the event occurs. 

We’ll need to plan. 

For example, we’ll experiment this season with a larger volume of, and greater variety of, peonies than our three, current bushes yield. We’ll dig a new bed in front of the house in which to conduct some of this in-the-ground “R&D”.

Kathy holding some cukes

I half-joked to Kathy that if  she and her fiancé, Jake, can wait until August or September, then we can also grace the tables at the event with our lovely cucumbers! 

As vegetable gardeners know, it’s not hard to grow too many cukes. And they do bring forth their own small, lovely flowers! Cukes come in many lengths and with a variety of shapes, shades, and markings. 

For us, figuring out what to do with all of them represents one of the predictable challenges of late summer. A jar of pickles at each wedding reception table?  (For her part, Kathy appreciates cucumbers, but thus far expresses a little skepticism about including them in the wedding plans … there’s still time!).

But, just making the garden part of the wedding plans adds another way that it will have grown with us into another chapter of our family’s life. Kathy and her brothers grew up with, and in, its beds and seasonal manifestations. 

Next summer, we’ll celebrate anew, together.

Guest blogger Richard S. Kordesh is the author of Restoring Power to Parents and Places and has worked professionally in the community development field for 35 years. Visit Richard's website for more.