I know that this is probably a pretty long post for a blog but I guess I am taking license since it is my first one.  I hope that you enjoy the story of my first and best vegetable garden ever.

When I was five years old, my family lived in what we referred to as "the big house on the hill".  The big house on the hill was a home that my father rented in the little town of Roosevelt Utah. Most things from that period of my childhood have dimmed from memory but there are a few things that still stand out.

For one thing, the big house on the hill was BIG.  I have no idea how big it really was, but to a five year old boy it seemed enormous.  It was gray and had the feeling of being very old and very run down.  Considering our financial position at the time, this is probably the case as such were the only homes that my parents could afford. 

Besides being old and gray and run down, it's next distinguishing characteristic was the fact that it had scorpions.  I know.  It WAS pretty freaky.  Apparently, there were not enough to run us out but just enough to keep us on our toes.  We probably only found half a dozen in the few years we lived there, but to this day I cannot think of that house without the image of a small white scorpion coming to my mind with an involuntary shudder. 

My father had always had a green thumb but the first year that we lived in the big house on the hill, Dad decided to plant a BIG vegetable garden.  He was very excited about the project and showed several of his friends the garden plot that he had picked out.  They all said the same thing.  "You'll never be able to grow anything there Bob!  It's all rocks."  And it was.  It was so full of rocks that it took about as much work to get the ground ready to plant as it did to weed it once it was planted. 

Now, many of you are probably asking yourselves "why didn't he just make raised beds and save the family a ton of work?"  Well, I guess you would only understand if you knew Dad.  Dad didn't think like most other people and now that I look back on it, I wonder if using raised beds would have seemed to him to be something akin to cheating.  If he covered the rocks with beds, he would still know that the rocks were there even if you couldn't see them and even if he had the most gorgeous vegetable garden in town, he would feel that he had cheated his way around the rocks.

Years later, when the family would get together they would often remember the garden at the big house on the hill, and the first thing they would always mention was how much work it was.  The funny thing about my recollection of that garden is that I don't have any first hand memories of working in it.  I was little and I am sure my workload was proportionate to my size but for some reason, I don't remember the work at all.  I remember my sister sitting on the front porch complaining about the work and I remember stories about how hard everyone worked but I don't remember the work itself. 

The second thing we would mention was the incredible harvest we had that year.  To this day, when I think of what a successful healthy garden should look and feel like, I think of that garden.   I still remember the looks of satisfaction on my parents faces as they described the beautiful produce that the garden produced.  I remember my mother spending hours and hours canning vegetables that came from that garden.  But, what I remember most was Dad and I walking through the garden in the cool of the evening after he got off work picking fresh peas and eating them out of the pod.  Mom would say "if you keep eating all those peas off the pod, they'll never get to the dinner table!"  and they never did.  As I remember, she finally gave up and Dad and I ate them all just as they ripened and for some reason that was OK.  Mom must have decided that Dad had earned the peas for all of his hard work and I think I got in on the reward just for being cute.

I have grown a few gardens since, but I have never grown a garden that felt quite like the one on the plot by the big house on the hill.  It was my first and best vegetable garden ever.  Of those who were there, I am the only one left to plant more gardens.  Perhaps that is the reason that I chose this story as my first contribution for this blog.  They are no longer here to fill in the gaps that I don't remember and it is a good memory; one that I don't want to forget. 

If you have any good gardening stories, please share them with us by posting a comment.  Good Luck and Happy Gardening!