Worth it...

This is usually the point in my gardening journey where I begin to feel overwhelmed.  Everything seems unruly and overgrown, the weeds are taking over, the pests are showing their ugly faces, and my inexperience becomes a serious problem.  And then I take a deep breath and remember to approach it all like a great big experiment.  Sometimes it seems crazy how much time and effort I exert... only to harvest a small amount of food.  Then we're sitting down to a stir-fry and my daughter tastes the broccoli and snap peas from our garden (that she helped plant and tend) and she says, "I don't like vegetables... I LOVE them!"  And instantly every single carrot or radish or tomato or snap pea is so completely worth it.

I'm actually amazed that I have a few heads of broccoli actually coming in (delicious!), but these little caterpillars are everywhere.  Twice a day, I'm picking them off my plants and feeding them to my very happy chickens (and I have to say that there is nothing more satisfying than seeing these pests devoured by my hens... I'm not sure what that says about me!).

And here is the current state of things in the rest of the unruly garden...