This summer I decided to take up some simple vegetable gardening. I knew it would happen someday. It's in my blood. My dad has planted and tended summer gardens of various sizes my whole life. For several years, our family's garden filled the whole half acre second lot behind our home. We had strawberries, melons, tomatoes, sweet corn, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, acorn squash, and even pumpkins.
I don't remember much about Dad planting the garden each spring, but I suppose that is because planting wasn't my job. My job was weeding, and I absolutely hated it! Dad gave my brother and I the incentive of five cents for every two-quart bucket of weeds we pulled, which was a lot for seven- and nine-year-old children in the late 1960s, but he could have paid ten times that much, and …