3rd Place
Home School
Richardson, TX

Our garden is a good place because you get to eat a lot of greens and a lot of fruits. Our garden has lots of good vegetables like asparagus, pumpkins, spinach, lettuce, peas, parsley, carrots, herbs, dead corn, green beans, peppers (including spicy white peppers!), sweet potatoes, cabbage, yellow squash, cucumber, mint, collard greens, cabbage, kohlrabi, tomatoes, eggplant, okra; and all the fruits like cantaloupe, watermelon, and strawberries. We even planted a plum and a peach tree in the front yard, but the peaches and plums got stolen. We will have lots next year.

My step-dad Allen, his friend James, and I got lots of exercise planting the garden. We dug lots of dirt, a whole dump truck load full. I moved lots of cider blocks and the raised beds. My muscles got really big. I learned some math when Allen and I made a scale map of the garden. It had pictures of all our vegetables and where we planted them.

My whole family worked on our garden. We weeded the garden lots of mornings. We put lots of mulch on the dirt, but grass and stuff keeps trying to grow. We need more mulch, and we need a lot more wood chips. Maybe we can get the old chips from our daycare where we used to go to when they get new ones for the playground. We can get some free from the city, across the street from our house. There's a tree-trimming company that has piles of wood chips bigger than our house, as big as the city's water pump building.

My family has been getting lots of vitamins from the food we grow. It's fresh, and we eat more because it tastes better. My sister and I love the green beans, and we eat up a whole bowl-full for dinner, and then I'm stuffed. Vegetables are good for you, but candy tastes better. Vegetables are better than candy, though. That's why I'm so tall.

We have lots more animals in our yard this year than last year. We have lots of squirrels. They dig up the garden. They ate our first pumpkin seeds we planted! The squash came up okay, though. Our yard is full of birds, and they like to eat tomatoes. We have the healthiest and first toad we ever saw in our yard. He eats bugs. We bought five hundred ladybugs and put them in the garden to eat aphids. We even saw a lizard.

We are very happy with our garden. We are glad we planted it this year.