How does your garden grow?

How does my garden grow, you ask?

To tell the truth, better this year than ever before--still not perfect, but we at least got some corn, sweet peas, and zucchini out of it this year, and I'm still waiting on some of the hundreds of tomatoes I see on our vine to ripen.  For the black thumb I tend to have, I'm pretty thrilled with our produce this year.

That being said, let me tell you all a story.

Once upon a time, we had chickens.  You may recall my story of one of said chickens nearly being drowned by my enthusiastic pet-washing children, and so I refer to our chickens in the past tense--not because any of them actually died under our watch (barely), but because I got tired of trying to keep 3 children, one husband, a dog, 4 chickens, and 5 fish alive (not to mention any plants that had the distinct unfortunate luck to fall under my care).  I realized that something had to go, and eBay doesn't have a option where you can sell children, so I decided to bequeath my chickens to my parents, who have a large farmyard area with several chickens of their own.  

Yes, our chickens really did go to live on a farm.

No, that's not code for "They died."

So, come spring planting time, I was working on my garden, and as Jack and Clark stomped over my newly-planted seeds for the umpteenth billionth time, I came up with the brilliant idea to let Jack plant his own garden in the now-unused chicken run that we had empty.  He stays in his space and quits walking all over my tender little seedlings, I get to plant uninterrupted as he putters around with his seeds, he gets to play in the dirt--sounded like a win-win situation to me!

I watched Jack as he haphazardly dumped a handful of corn seeds in one spot and covered them up, then did the same with his zucchini seeds and a couple of sweet pea seeds, as well, and laughed under my breath.

"Oh, well," I thought--"at least he's having fun and is out of my hair!"

Then I left it at that for a few weeks.

I kept working in my garden, and every once in a while, I would glance in the chicken  run to check things out and see how Jack's plants were growing--and, despite the effort I was putting into my garden and the serious lack thereof Jack was putting into his, his garden THRIVED.  Far more than mine, if we're being honest.

At one point, I went in to see how his gigantic plants were coming along, and he came with me. 

"Wow, Mom!  My plants are way bigger than yours are!"

I glanced self-consciously at my pathetic little zucchini plants that were still struggling to come up out of the ground and forced a laugh.  "It's okay, Jack, it's not a race."

He immediately got deadly serious.  "Yes, Mom, it is a race.  And I'm winning."

Okay, then.

He had a volunteer pumpkin plant grow through the fence and start covering half of our flower bed (yes, we've found four pumpkins on it thus far), his zucchini plant has given us some of the biggest zucchini I've ever seen, and although his sweet peas never made it past the stage where Jack decided to dig them up and check out their roots, we ate a few of his ears of corn last week, and they were delicious.

Apparently, an area that has had chickens living in it for two years tends to be rather fertile.  

Duh.

One unforeseen complication?

Jack is rather attached to his plants.  He has named every single vegetable to come out of his garden, and when we tell him we're planning to eat them, he protests quite emotionally.

"But, Blork (true name) is my best friend!  You can't eat him!"

You can see that he is quite emotional about the idea of parting with Blork, the zucchini.
Hopefully the delicious zucchini bread I made out of Jack's best friend soothed his broken heart a little.  But how traumatizing do you think it will be for the rest of his life that we ate his best friend when he was little?
Here's hoping he gets over it without too much therapy.