I‘ve been gardening since I can remember. My father planted tomatoes in our backyard not paying much attention to create any visual appeal, tomatoes came up every year were sweet, delicious and our very own. 
His dabbling proved to be a very gratifying experience for him and my mother, for me it planted the seed (no pun intended), the seed soon blossomed into a deep appreciation for all thing Agra.
Gardening has also become an excellent opportunity to teach and interact with my boys. You see they might not realize it but by me actively teaching the next generation by positive example, my goal is to present a future where the garden and experiences derived from the act of gardening like planning, physical labor and patience aid and encourage mindful food consumption and question its nutritional integrity.
Even the Winter the garden manages to teach, the daily constant chore of taking kitchen scraps to our compost in the cold and snow is an annoyance but yet everyday they alternate and do it.
This is also the time we start the dreaming process for the up and coming season. Our crop plan for the season seems to be determined by the many seed catalogs we go through and how magnificent the plants look in the pictures.
During the summer my barefoot son Jack loves to pick the raspberries for dessert and sharing his little surprise with friends. They pick berries, potatoes, eggplant, asparagus, onions, garlic, and melons and surprisingly I hear him explaining how the vegetable and
fruit grow. All three appreciate the taste of naturally grown food, most likely because of my passion. I am counting on my boys to someday plant their own plots to dazzle their young ones, the same way the beautiful lovely ladies did with me so many years ago in a beautiful town on Long Island. We learned in the end the value of hard physical work to produce nutritious organic food along with beautiful flowers to brighten up any home. Not a bad lesson to teach our boys.