All thinnings became food for children, and we ate them right in the garden. Mom's friends had questioned her wisdom, starting such a large garden that far from water, but the growing interest and appetites of her children proved her wisdom. None of us had liked vegetables much. Almost everything was good. If one of us didn't like one vegetable, somebody else did.
Carrots grow a long time before they gain any size.
We ate radishes, lettuce, spinach, peas, kohlrabi, and strawberries before we pulled and ate the first small carrots. Once I ate carrots right from the garden, I always liked fresh, carefully grown, carefully watered carrots. We loved rain that sometimes poured down from the generous sky and released us from water-hauling duties to run to other adventures. Dad might have gotten around to stringing an electric wire down the hill, the way he'd promised, and he might have installed a pump to pump water to the garden the next summer. But he worked construction and followed the jobs, and we moved from Cedar Flats that winter.