We’ve entered a writing contest for Mother’s Day, so Valentine, our head Garden Gal could win a basket of Gardening tools. (The contest ends on May 8^th.) The rules were that it had to be about a gal (didn’t even have to be a Mommy, although Valentine is “Mommy” to Tee and Tine, of course) and had to be under 301 words. Here’s what we wrote:

Mommy became disabled, so our money is tight and she can’t work past 3 hours a day, but she rediscovered childlike resourcefulness. That’s when we came along! We’re the Garden Gals, some of her stuffed animals.

Our leader is Valentine, a bunny who knows gardens better than Peter Rabbit, and deserves the gardening basket. She helped make our container garden into a lush paradise last summer in a 16’ X 16’ concrete yard. Valentine knows that a garden is a place to play. If it’s work, it’s wrong.

Mommy tried gardening properly, but couldn’t. Valentine has her taking our photos as we grow what we want.

-         Normal pumpkins can’t grow in containers. Our girls engraved a face, which grew as the pumpkin grew, into one of our four pumpkins.

-         Popcorn needs lots of space. Ours grew in a storage bin and was pollinated by shaking the tassels over a bowl. Then we painted that pollen onto the silk. Yummy!

-         Seeds must be sowed by May 15th. Our hyacinth beans and moonflower seeds weren’t sowed until June 15th. They covered our fence and trellis in August.

-         Small containers belong on fancy plant stands. We used a child’s round picnic table.

-         Grow plants in flowerpots. Ours are in seashells, watering cans, colanders, plastic jars, and olive oil cans.

-         Buy a topiary form. We made our own teddy bear topiary that ivy is hugging.

-         Mommy can’t lean over easily, so our cucumbers grew in buckets in our red wagon, our basil and dill grew in our old grill and toy dump truck, and we filled the bottoms of big containers with crushed cans to move them easily.

Valentine has taught Mommy how to play in our garden, and taught us to love our veggies.

We even included a picture of all of us at the end of gardening season, last year.

The contest isn’t even over, before we have proof that Mommy has NOT been obeying Valentine’s orders! We took this picture of Mommy working in our garden without us!

Anyone know how to make mommies listen to their kids?!