Garden Babies: Garden Update 3

Raspberries planted this year have produced an unexpectedly good yield.  Caveboy approves. 

Summertime, and the food is easy.  My oldest son is wandering the yard, foraging for raspberries and grazing on chard. It's a funny thing for a 3 year old to be into, but I'll often see him wandering around with a big red and green leaf in his hand.  This is what I was hoping for when I cranked up the size and scope of my garden after he was born.

Last year, as he turned two, the only food in the garden that was ready for him to pick and eat were the tomatoes in the hoop house.  And eat them he did.  My wife assumed that we didn't get many tomatoes last year, and the yield wasn't what it could have been had I not killed 2/3 of the plants, but the rest were victims of the Caveboy.

Sungold tomatoes from 2014.  This variety is great for children to forage for. No doubt this one was eaten by Caveboy shortly after this picture was taken.  

Next year the younger child will be almost two years old, and there will be so much more to eat. Those raspberry plants, pillaged from a patch that grew out of someone's yard to takeover a public area, will be in their second year.  In addition the strawberries I planted under them will start to produce fruit, as will the haskap and red currant bushes.

Two rows of berries will become at least 4 when the hugel beds, now covered in squash and corn, are conditioned for shrub growth.  Maybe I won't even have to prepare meals for my kids next July and August. 

Foraging and gathering seem to be natural activities for children, and they probably should be. Our forest dwelling ape ancestors had to forage for their food, and the need to gather likely contributed to bipedalism when climate change removed forest from the equation and left our ancestors in open woodlands, or savannas.

Our 10 month old has recently become bipedal, and this of course allows him to gather thing from one part of the house, and move them to another, and to run towards the edge of the deck causing multiple panics a day for us parents.

I would definitely encourage anyone with even a brownish green thumb to plant some permanent, edible plants.  Much of what I have planted will need very little water or care once it is established. A 25 foot row of raspberries can produce up to 25 pounds of berries in a year.