I’m a momma’s boy at heart - always have been, always will be. The perks have been endless - from chocolate and vanilla pinwheel cookies as a young child to attending cheese-making classes as a pre-teen to ultimately inheriting her green thumb through years of her patient tutoring as we worked side-by-side in her vegetable garden. Though my mom passed away many years ago, the love of gardening she instilled in me continues unabated.

Most years I’ve had a large, successful garden. However, I took a break from gardening after the births of my two youngest children. I found I couldn’t maintain my large garden plot. What I had loved in the past became a source of frustration. I’d look out the kitchen window and see the garden overrun with weeds, vegetables overripe and gone to waste. I felt guilt and frustration over the waste and what might have been.

Ultimately I took out the garden plot, including my raspberry and blackberry plants. I replaced the garden plot with a large basketball court – fertile ground for two active, growing boys.

Still, my desire to garden remained. On a cold, bleak December day I decided to setup a small indoor garden. I purchased several window-box planters, potting soil and beet seed. I love beet greens and that seemed a good place to start. By late winter I was enjoying the fresh greens and my indoor garden had significantly expanded. I decided to start all my vegetable plants rather than buy started plants from the local garden center.

Much to the frustration of my spouse, my indoor garden had taken over an entire corner of the kitchen. Squash, melons, tomatoes, peas, kohlrabi and so forth were thriving under grow lights in my kitchen. Unfortunately my relationship with my spouse wasn’t thriving. She claimed to be living in fear of a DEA drug raid due to the fluorescent glow spilling out the kitchen windows.Simply put, the plants and I were booted out of the kitchen.

We moved into the garage for a short time. That didn’t really work either because the fluorescent glow moved with us. Even worse, the neighbors could see “green things” growing in the garage. There was no choice but to move my not so little garden outdoors. But how? I had no garden plot. Even if I had, the ground was far to cold for planting. The solution was containers – a container garden. The roots of the plants would be safely above the cold ground and I could cover the containers to keep the plants sufficiently warm and to give them time to condition to a life outdoors.

I quickly started acquiring and building garden containers. I purchased raised bed garden soil in bulk. Soon my garden was outdoors and thriving and I had discovered gardening in a way that fit with raising two young and very active boys.

The kids loved working with me in the container garden. We made labels for each container. Watering was easy and weeding was almost non-existent. The container garden expanded to include strawberries, blueberries, Jerusalem artichokes, cucumbers, beets and many other plants.

Harvesting was a breeze and became second nature. The boys would stop playing ball to pick and eat the strawberries. They would come into the house with cucumbers and “baby” carrots and beets. Most importantly, the boys enjoy gardening, eating the fresh produce and learning self-reliance skills. And for me… I’m grateful for a mom that grew a boy into a man.