A Feast for the Senses

Natalie and I spent the morning in the garden.  Our poor neglected garden is full of volunteers, (either seeds from our compost or remnants from last year) and weeds!  My plan was to make a salad from all the volunteer lettuce and arugula we have in the beds and the path.  Natalie has a ball in the garden  

She loves to play in the beds when the drip line is on and always manages to get soaked.  She also likes to move the rocks from the path to the beds and back... and pull the leaves off of stuff!!  

She's always right at my feet playing, and I'm able to keep her from putting too much dirt into her mouth!! (I don't know what's so appealing about wet soil, but I'm almost tempted to try it one of these days.)  

Well, this morning she was working on something, and I asked her to spit it out.  Out popped a strawberry!  I let her have it back, and eventually she spit out the stem and leaves... then I watched her for a minute and this is what I saw:

She quickly learned a lesson in colors when the green strawberry was yucky and hard, but the red one was delicious.  

I don't think there's a red or partially red berry left in the patch!  The birds finally have some decent competition for the fruit which I'd given up to them and the weeds!  

Once the berries were caput, we moved onto greener fare.  Natalie tried lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, nasturtium, cilantro, and chives.  

Since she still has no chomping teeth, the greens are a bit tough for her to take, but she worked on everything (except the cilantro) until it was mush and then spit it out.  

After our salad was made, we worked our way back to the house with a pit stop at the patio garden... Natalie explored the pig, (in desperate need of a paint job) and some flowers.  

What the camera can't capture are the smells and sounds... Natalie's looking around because she hears kids playing in the yard next door... there are always planes going overhead, (and she always points to them), and there's a bird feeder on a post behind the irises so the finches are all over the place!  

And those irises smell like grape candy!  Really!  It's crazy but they do!  Behind them is a big flowering sage bush that when you brush it smells like the prairie.  And in front of all of that is a bunch of thyme, oregano, and savory.  

I really hope Natalie grows up to love being in the garden as much as I do.  Right now I'm satisfied to watch her enjoy digging her hands in the mud, pulling flowers apart, and sticking fresh strawberries in her little mouth!  I think the seeds are planted!