Ali is a stay at home mom with two kids, ages 6 and 4. She is a dear friend of mine back home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and she started her own backyard garden about 4 years ago. The purpose was not only to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for her family but to teach her children the importance and ease of growing food in your own backyard. This has been a hand’s on project for the whole family ever since.

I reached out to her with these questions and received beautiful responses! Take a look:

What were/are your motivations for having your own backyard garden? I grew up having two parents that gardened, so it always felt like something that was inevitable. Once we had a house, we turned over the soil in the back and I planted our first row of carrots. I had no idea what I was doing, but I learned. Now, my motivations are to teach my children about working with the soil and the “circle of life”, hard work, and to continue growing myself through this really organic relationship between me and the earth.

What are some of your daily commitments? It depends on the season, in the summer there is weeding and watering, along with planting if you want your harvest to be staggered and last longer. Then there seems to be a time where all you do is harvest and then preserve, or share. Things are so abundant, you can’t remember a time when you didn’t have fresh food. In the fall, you need to close it up, we cover the soil with leaves, like a blanket. Then you can compost year round, which is such a joyful thing to do. In the winter, you think and plan, write out a schedule so you know when to plant what, and you can start growing seedlings at the end of the winter/beginning of spring.

What kinds of obstacles have you experienced with growing food at home? Time and rabbits. I have young kids, and their willingness to garden is a lot shorter than what is necessary to get the work done. Rabbits love our kale. They dig through all of our barricades and dine at their leisure.

How has your garden impacted people? Our neighbors stop in all of the time to talk and look. We share our food with neighbors, and invite our friends to come and pick what they need. It is such a community building activity to own a garden. Often people who don’t garden, feel guilty for taking so much produce, but those who garden understand how joyful it is to share during that time of abundance and gratefully accept. My kids also understand seasonal eating now, so that when they see Strawberries for sale in January they realize that they won’t be fresh and juicy, and local like a June strawberry.

What recommendations do you have for people who have never had any kind of gardening experience? Just do it, and ask questions. The ground is forgiving, and you learn so much about yourself, and your role in the larger picture of life.

What has this experience taught you? It has taught me countless lessons, too many to count really. Mainly spiritual lessons about my response to chaos in life, a lot about parenting and my relationship with control. I also treat these beautiful plants as friends, and thank them for the relationship that I have with them. That might sound crazy, but that’s simply how I feel!

Also, please enjoy these photos from her backyard…