My daughter has the ability to hone in on the healthiest foods on her plate, remove said healthy foods and then promptly refuse to eat them. It’s truly a skill in some cases, like when I put tiny diced up cooked carrots in her pasta and she removes them from a mouthful of unrecognizable, half-chewed mush.

Okay, raw carrots I can understand, they’re crunchy…but cooked carrots? How can she tell??

Anyway, this summer we planted a garden full of vegetables and all of the sudden I found my veggie-hating toddler experimenting with raw, fresh greens! She will now eat sliced zucchini with a little hummus on top, which we call pizza (it’s all in the name, sometimes we call it “garden candy”).

If it’s out of our garden and she picks it, she’ll eat it. She’s been known to eat a salad if made from the lettuce we grew with our own hands.

We should all take a lesson from the picky eater known as my daughter: everything tastes better when it’s made with love. We had more fun tending to our garden all summer than anything else.

And then you top it all off with the fact we get good, healthy organic food from it? It doesn’t get better then that.