The Sunday Gardener: Mother's Day in the Garden

“How does your garden grow?” With this question in mind, we’re sitting down with terrain’s own avid gardeners to find out what they’re digging throughout the seasons. Each month, our experts will provide their essentials for spending a Sunday in the garden. With Mother's Day just around the corner, we're chatting with terrain's Community Manager, Cat K., who spent last Sunday in the garden with her little ones.

Cat says, "A long, cold winter like the one we just had can definitely result in some serious cabin fever, so as soon as the temperature climbed above freezing this spring, we went outside and haven't been indoors much since. We moved into a house just outside the city last fall, and the woman who lived here before us was an incredible gardener. The outdoor space is just a tiny postage stamp of lawn and garden, but she was resourceful in how she maximized every square foot, intermixing ornamental and edible plants for a space that's both functional and beautiful.

Right now, everything is coming into bloom and my kids are beyond excited about it. Every morning is like a treasure hunt-- we get to go outside and try to find what opened up since we last looked. The only hard part is trying to convince them not to pull up every beautiful thing we find. My four-year-old son came into the house last week proudly gifting me a fist full of pansies freshly yanked from the containers I had just planted, and I recently caught him eyeing up some delicate, new muscari for the same reason.

Last weekend, as an early Mother's Day gift, the kids "helped" my husband and I put the first plants into the raised beds in our back patio. I find that gardening with little ones forces me to go with the flow a bit more than I would otherwise, definitely in a good way. Our rows aren't very tidy this year, more than one arugula starter was buried by a toddler footprint, and an entire pack of radish seeds ended up into one of the beds. Still, I think we made out okay in the end and now everyone is excited to see the plants grow. The kids are always much more open to trying new foods when they find them growing in the garden. My daughter put away her weight in cherry tomatoes pulled from the vine last summer, and my son - oddly - loves to munch on handfuls of lemon thyme from our herb bed. And they both go crazy when the raspberries start coming in on the sunny trellis behind our house."