One of the greenest things you can do is to grow a vegetable garden. It really isn’t that difficult and the rewards are more than worth the work and money.
We built raised boxes over the lawn with 12X2 boards and filled them with compost and rich soil (cover the lawn with corrugated paper or thick layers of newspaper before putting the dirt down). We then went to the nursery and chose tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, beans, pumpkins, watermelon, artichoke and a variety of herbs. The only things that didn’t grow were the watermelon and artichoke. And this fall, I was so excited to choose all types of lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, winter tomatoes and seeds for spinach, carrots, onions and radish. Even if you just have a small patio or balcony, many vegetables do well in pots.
There’s nothing like the sweet taste of summer sun in a warm, juicy, ripe tomato!
We feasted on the freshest and best vegetables all summer. And now that I have lettuce available to me, we eat it all the time. I used to pass the spinach and lettuce at the grocery store with contempt. I chose carefully, thinking, would this be the time that I’ll pick one that has e coli in it? Will this be the time that I force my kids to eat a vegetable and they get deathly ill? Now I can pick with pride. There is nothing in our vegetables but wholesome goodness. No pesticides, no human or animal has spit, urinated or defecated on the garden. I get such a sense of pride that I can go outside and pick something that we grew and that we can eat it for dinner or lunch. I love to grab a few leaves of lettuce and make a quick salad. In the summer, we ate tomatoes on everything. As well as zucchini. We even grew our own pumpkins. It is such a joy to place them on the porch for the 
autumn holidays! Everyone is in awe of our pumpkins, but really, all we did was plant the sprout that we got at the nursery, make sure it got watered and nature did everything else!
This garden has also been a blessing.
My kids love to help me. They run outside with me at dinnertime and pick something. I can get them to eat lettuce from our patch, when I can’t get them to eat it otherwise! Besides the health benefits, the garden has been a family benefit. The kids are learning things about nature that they could never learn in school. And we are all working together to achieve something good.
What can be better than that?
I love your garden and I agree that some of the best memories come from picking the fruit of your labor and helping my Mama in the garden. I can not wait to have my own. Very nice!