{"id":19981,"date":"2018-06-29T09:20:15","date_gmt":"2018-06-29T16:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doorposts.com\/blog\/?p=19981"},"modified":"2018-06-29T09:20:27","modified_gmt":"2018-06-29T16:20:27","slug":"child-training-boot-camp-2-begins-on-sunday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doorposts.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/29\/child-training-boot-camp-2-begins-on-sunday\/","title":{"rendered":"Child-Training Boot Camp 2 Begins on Sunday!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I love <\/em>being outside, but I\u2019m definitely not the athletic type. Gardening is my outdoor \u201csport\u201d \u2013 a nice quiet form of exercise and relaxation that has helped provide food for us over the years while getting me outside to enjoy the sunshine.<\/p>\n

My very first garden was a whopper. I tried growing just about everything I could find in the Burpee\u2019s seed catalog. I learned as I went, with Rodale\u2019s Organic Gardening <\/em>book in one hand, and a hoe in the other. One thing I learned, thankfully before <\/em>I planted all those seeds, was that our hard clay soil needed help if it was going to grow very much.<\/p>\n

We brought in a whole dump truck load of sand to spread over the 60 x 60 foot space, ran a big tractor back and forth to work the sand and composted manure into the soil, and hammered in stakes and strings to mark rows all over that beautiful soil, following my very carefully drawn-out-on-graph-paper plan.<\/p>\n

Boy, did that garden grow! After more than forty years of gardening, I think I can still say that first garden was probably my best and most productive garden ever. I had the whole summer off, since I was a school teacher, and I spent hours out there, watching seedlings magically push up out of the ground, hoeing out the weeds, and eventually hauling loads of produce into the house and around the neighborhood to give away.<\/p>\n

I worked hard. But if the soil hadn’t been prepared so that it was rich and loose, it wouldn’t have mattered how much weeding and hoeing and bug-squishing I did. The garden would simply not have thrived in that hard clay soil.<\/p>\n

If you’re a gardener and a parent, you’ve probably noticed the similarities between gardening and raising children;<\/p>\n