Starting over: Life Lessons in Gardening.

Here at City Kids, we post a lot of happy pictures showing the amazing harvests we have had, and those are all real and awesome moments. But we have had difficulties, too, and those difficulties are just as valuable to the learning process. We planted beets that we never got to harvest because leaf miners ate our beet leaves, for example. It was disappointing not to get to harvest our beets, but our kids learned an important lesson about photosynthesis and why the beets weren't doing so well. We also learned how to identify and minimize damage by leaf miners.

Sometimes, all of our hard work does not yield what we would like, and that is a crucial lesson in life for our kids. So we show them that we keep going, nurturing, and caring for our garden, and sometimes we start over. But we always learn something significant in the process. Along the way, I hope our gardening project teaches our kids that having the tenacity to start over and keep going is worthwhile and satisfying.

Because that's life!