The Garden Lab: What Our First Garden Taught Us
A professor once told me that there are only three great stories in the world: man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus God. I have decided that our story, that of a woman + two children starting a very first summer garden, highlights the tensions of the man versus nature narrative. There were struggles, successes, wonders, losses, and good meals enjoyed. Today we’re going to be talking about the lessons we learned from the epic adventure of our first summer garden.
Earlier this spring, I shared how reading The Secret Garden inspired my daughter to want a flower garden of her own and encouraged our family to finally attempt a vegetable garden. Armed with organic and heirloom seeds from Azure Standard, upcycled egg cartons, galvanized above-ground planters, and more enthusiasm than experience, we began our first garden as part of our homeschool, turning our backyard into a living laboratory for the summer. Our plan was simple: start small, try to stay consistent, and see what we could grow.
Azure was already part of our family’s rhythm before we planted the first seed. We’ve ordered bulk staples for much of our gluten-free baking, along with some of their clean self-care products and snacks, so when we decided to grow our first garden, it made sense to look there for seeds too. In March, we got started with choosing seeds from Azure and deciding what would grow best in our area. Once everything arrived, we started seedlings in egg cartons, then transferred them to the above-ground beds once they sprouted.
Let’s fast-forward to the end of July, having made it through one of the hottest, wettest summers I can remember. There was about a month of daily rain showers, and temperatures have been in the high 90s and low 100s quite often. Nature definitely tested us during this first attempt.
Despite not being able to change the weather, I can say that we did stay pretty consistent in caring for our garden, which was one of my biggest goals for our family. The wonder involved in watching nature do what nature is meant to do is something I’ve heard about and read about, but never witnessed in my own garden. The process ignited curiosity in both my children and me.
But not every seed grew, and not everything that grew survived. Animals, insects, and fungi found their way into our organic garden, presenting challenges and losses at times. Our first garden was neither an outrageous success nor a total devastation. It was something far more ordinary and, perhaps, more instructive: a first attempt.
Nothing teaches quite like a first attempt can.
So here are some of the lessons we’ve learned through both our successes and failures. Some may be obvious to seasoned gardeners but important to fellow beginners. Others are more about what we can learn in our homeschool by observing growing things each day in their natural habitat, or even by experiencing varied degrees of success. As we homeschoolers know, learning is everywhere! Here’s where our family found it in our summer garden.
1. First Garden 101. Choose the Garden That Fits Your Family
Before you decide what to plant, it helps to decide where you are going to plant it. An in-ground garden, a raised bed, and a container garden can all grow wonderful things, but each comes with its own advantages and complications.
An in-ground garden is often the least expensive option if you have suitable soil and a sunny patch of land. It gives sprawling plants room to roam, but digging, amending, and weeding a new plot can be a significant undertaking.
Raised beds and large containers require more investment at the beginning, but they allow you to choose your soil, create good drainage, and garden without quite as much bending or kneeling.
They are also easy to position near the house, which matters more than I expected. It allowed us to put our garden in the backyard where we could easily see what was happening with it from our bedroom windows. This reminded us when extra hot days required extra watering, when the tomatoes needed to be clipped to the tomato cages, and when bunnies were invading (more on that later).
For our vegetable garden, we opted for galvanized container beds. Being able to fill them with our own soil mixture was especially helpful, and I like that we can change what grows in them from season to season. For this first endeavor, they worked very well.
My daughter’s flower garden was a mixture of in-ground planting and containers. Some flowers had room to spread, while others could be moved if they needed more or less sun. We also used felt grow bags to get some plants started, making use of sunny spaces without committing to another permanent bed.
The lesson here? The best setup is not necessarily the most impressive one. It is the one your family can realistically plant, water, observe, and enjoy. Starting with one or two manageable beds taught us far more than an ambitious garden we could not maintained would have.
2. Space Your Plants Wisely to Prioritize Healthy Growth
My children helped plant the seeds, and this included my three-year-old. The result, as you might imagine, was that our spacing was all over the place. Also, some seeds got planted where they did not belong. This was evidenced by a surprise radish among the calendula.
And, to be fair, this was part of the charm of making the garden a family project. Tiny fingers poked holes in the soil. Seeds vanished into the same general region. Everyone felt a sense of ownership and wonder when the first green shoots emerged. I would not trade that for ruler-straight rows.
However, I would supervise the spacing a little more closely next time.
Our zucchini, for instance, was prolific at first. The plants grew quickly, produced beautiful yellow blossoms, and gave us several wonderful zucchini early in the season. Then they kept growing…and growing. Their broad leaves began competing for room in our limited bed, making it harder for air and sunlight to move through the plants.
Lesson learned: crowding does more than make a bed look wild. Plants that are too close together compete for water and nutrients, and reduced airflow can create conditions in which fungal diseases spread more easily. In our hot, humid, and very rainy summer, the zucchini did not need any additional disadvantages. Fungi have been a consistent issue with our zucchini, even causing many veggies to rot on the vine. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the uneven spacing contributed to this issue.
Now, that doesn’t mean young children cannot help with planting. They absolutely can. Next time, I might place craft sticks, stones, or small flags where each seed should go and let my toddler put one seed at each marker. Older children can read the seed packet, measure the bed, and calculate how many plants the space can reasonably hold. That could turn a basic garden task into a lesson in measurement and spatial reasoning. Next time, we’ll try to be a little more purposeful there.
3. Real-Life Application: Prune the Bad to Make Room for the Good
There is another hard lesson here for enthusiastic new gardeners: thinning seedlings is sometimes an act of care. In trying to revitalize our zucchini, I had to thin out the bed significantly, even pulling up entire plants. That can feel terribly wasteful, especially when you worked so hard to coax it from a seed. But giving the strongest plants enough room can make the difference between many crowded plants that struggle and fewer plants that produce well.
In other words, plan for the plant it will become, not the adorable little sprout it is today. And homeschool mom, is this not a lesson for us in how we prioritize our homes and our days homeschooling? This physical reminder that little habits can grow into bigger problems- or, tended well, yield something wonderful- is a pretty convicting thought!
4. Know What Else Wants to Eat Your Garden
The most abundant crop in our garden was the Blue Lake bush beans we grew from seed from Azure Standard. They were the first plants to really take off, and we were all so excited. We harvested enough for several good meals and felt like highly competent gardeners for a few brief and shining days.
Then we discovered that something else was just as excited about the beans as we were: the bunnies.
We live in a rural place with an abundance of wonderful wildlife, including rabbits that are not afraid of anyone or anything. Our garden is right outside the window, so one early morning I was able to witness multiple bunnies chomping away at the beans. I opened the window and yelled at them. They were not deterred. If anything, they seemed confident that I lacked the resolve to come outside in my pajamas. They were wrong. I did, indeed, do this. Never have I ever felt so like Mr. McGregor.
I mean, look at them. The arrogance.
We tried rigging up a few preventative measures, but I do not think we were aggressive enough. I have reason to suspect that the deer, which are common on our property, enjoyed some of the beans as a snack as well. Within a couple of days, the Lake Bush Bean plants were pretty much gone. We were so sad, but glad that we at least enjoyed the produce for a while.
Our first mistake was waiting until the rabbits found the garden before deciding how to protect it. Next time, we will plan for wildlife from the beginning. For rabbits, I read that a short fence made of chicken wire or hardware cloth can be effective, especially if the mesh is small and the bottom is secured tightly to the ground. Deer might require a more substantial strategy because they can reach over or jump many small barriers.
We may also devote more space to vegetables and herbs that our local wildlife seems less interested in. Strongly scented plants such as garlic, onions, and some herbs are often less appealing to deer, while hot peppers may be a safer bet than tender bean plants.
Interestingly, everything left our herbs, tomatoes, and zucchini (mostly) alone this year. I am recording that as useful information about our particular property, not as a promise that every Southern rabbit has taken a solemn oath against basil.
Lesson learned: Before planting, ask what commonly visits your yard, what damage it causes, and what kind of barrier will actually stop it. Learning about the animals in your area may shape what you plant, where you plant it, and how you protect it. We began by planning for our appetites. Next time, we will account for the appetites outside our family too.
5. Let the Garden Train Your Children to Observe
While we should have been better prepared for our local wildlife, the truth is that there is also a great deal to learn from it as a homeschool family.
We learned about the rabbits and deer, of course, but we also began noticing the smaller creatures that inhabited or visited the garden. A little lizard loved our tomato plants. We caught it, observed it for a short time, and then returned it to its home. A beautiful grasshopper seemed to take up residence with the zucchini (can you spot him?) We saw spiders resting between leaves and dragonflies darting through the yard.
These sightings opened the door to conversations about food webs and the different roles creatures play in an ecosystem. For example, spiders are not insects, but arachnids, and many are useful predators of the insects that visit a garden. Dragonflies are insects and generalist predators, feeding on mosquitoes, flies, gnats, and other small prey. Lizards may also eat insects. Even the grasshopper, which may be less welcome when it is chewing on a plant, belongs to the larger ecosystem we were observing.
We used this Insect Viewer & Investigation Report to help the children slow down and look closely at the tiny creatures around them.
Both children loved feeling like detectives. My toddler peered through the viewer, while my older child recorded information about what we found. They could notice color, size, number of legs, wings, movement, habitat, and behavior, then use those observations to learn more about the creature.
The printable gave us a simple structure for turning, “Look, a bug!” into an investigation. Instead of immediately telling the children what they were seeing, we could discuss: Where did you find it? What is it doing? Is it eating the plant, hunting another creature, resting, or passing through? What details would help us identify it?
That distinction matters in a garden. Not every bug is a pest, and not every sign of insect life requires intervention. Careful observation helps children resist the urge to label every unfamiliar creature as “bad.” It also helps us decide when a plant is truly in trouble and when nature is simply carrying on around it.
There is so much to be grown in our children by cultivating their observational skills. We can check how plants respond to heat, shade, sunshine, and rain. We can compare leaves, count blossoms, measure vines, sketch insects, track changes, and look each day for new surprises.
One day, we discovered a huge squash that we had somehow missed the entire time. That was a particularly memorable reminder that looking and observing are not always the same thing. Look at how huge this thing was (my hand is for reference), and it was hidden from us despite our daily check-ins.
Learning to attend closely is vital in every area of education. It is part of scientific inquiry, nature study, reading comprehension, art, and our ability to wonder at the world God has made. A garden gives children (and adults) a living subject that changes from one day to the next, and it rewards them for coming back and paying attention.
Want to keep the learning growing?
Our Garden Lab turns the garden into a hands-on learning experience for your homeschool. Kids can explore plants, soil, pollinators, insects, weather, ecosystems, and more through real-world activities that encourage them to observe, ask questions, experiment, and discover.
5. Taking Encouragement from Success and Notes From Failure
Ultimately, I was happy with the outcome of our first garden. Our herbs did particularly well, and we have made many batches of summer pesto. We built meals around the Blue Lake beans (before the bunnies and deer helped themselves) and zucchini.
At the end of July, we still have much to look forward to. Many green tomatoes and new bell peppers are growing, and we are hopefully watching each day as they grow closer to being edible. Just today, as I write this, we cut and ate into our first ripe watermelon (a crimson sweet heirloom variety from Azure), and I swear it was the best watermelon I have ever had. Because it’s an heirloom watermelon, we are saving the seeds to try and replant next spring.
Heavy rain and high temperatures caused some watermelons to burst along the way. We learned that heat in the 100s and sudden water uptake can make watermelon fruit crack, particularly later in its growth. The weather was a lesson in the limits of our control. We can choose the seeds, prepare the beds, water the soil, and watch the plants. We cannot choose the temperature or tell the rain when it had done enough.
The unpredictability of nature (and our inability to control it) is another good life lesson, actually. We learned and discussed that some things cannot be helped. Sometimes you do all you can, and nature beats you. Sometimes you learn enough to pivot and work with nature more wisely the next time.
I think it’s important to talk about this with our kids: how not every worthy effort produces a perfect result. A plant may fail even after it has been faithfully tended. A storm or animals may undo work that mattered. Disappointment does not make the attempt worthless, though, and it does not mean we should never plant again.
I want my kids to learn that, whatever the outcome, there is inherent value in doing a thing well, in patience and perseverance. This lesson is one of the most important fruits growing out of our gardening experience, and I hope it will continue to bloom and yield a return.
Our first summer garden gave us vegetables, certainly, but it also gave us questions, stories, discoveries, and reasons to go outside together every day. It taught us to look more closely, plan a little more carefully, and hold our expectations with the humility that we can’t control it all. It made us hopefully a bit more patient and a little more grateful for every bean, tomato, squash, and herb that reached our table. I’m excited to keep learning lessons from planning, planting, harvesting, and (maybe?) preserving!
Speaking of that, one more little lesson that applies to both vegetation and life in general: when life gives you basil, enjoy the pesto while you can.
Did you plant a summer garden this year? What tips and tricks have you learned along the way, either in life or about actual gardening strategies?
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