My daughter decided last year she wanted to grow and garden, including pumpkins. So, we started buying seeds as soon as they hit the stores in the early spring. We bought a nice variety so she could try several vegetables.

We enjoyed many items from her garden to add to our summer and early fall meals. Her lettuce provided several side salads for our family. We enjoyed zucchini and yellow squash in many forms and have several bags of these shredded in the freezer for later use. She only harvested one carrot. There were many, many cucumbers to enjoy.

We canned several items including bread and butter pickles, pickle relish, and zucchini and cranberry relish. I made it a priority to make sure her produce got used. She entered her relish in our local community fall festival and was awarded a 2nd place ribbon.

Sharing the produce from the garden brought great joy. A friend of ours wrote a thank you note for the yellow squash and even put what she made from it on Facebook.

There was a nice harvest of pumpkins. She is proud we did not need to buy any pumpkins this fall. She noticed the price at the grocery store for pumpkins and told me it was cheaper to raise a whole bunch than just buy one.

We learned a great deal with this garden project. Weed control will need a new strategy next year. We have been looking into methods of using newspaper or grass clippings around the plants to help keep the weeds at bay. She would like to try watermelons again as only two tiny ones grew, but were not any good.

One day after bringing in several items of produce from her garden. My daughter told me it felt good to grow something. She truly has the spirit of a producer.