One of the most frustrating things about being a parent is how long it can take to make dinner.

Take for example, a simple meal like spaghetti and meatballs. I like to make my meatballs with a mix of beef and pork. According to Google, raising a calf until it’s big enough to eat can take about 18 to 24 months. Granted, one large bovine is good for more than just one meal, but that’s just getting the clock started.

Next up is the pasta. Wheat can take 6 to 8 months to mature, and that’s not including the time to harvest and process it.

We’re going to need some eggs to make the pasta as well, and although it only takes about three and a half weeks to hatch a chicken, it’s going to take another six or so months until they’re laying eggs.

Finally, our tomatoes and herbs for the sauce. I’m keeping this as simple as I can. Say two to three months to grow the tomatoes, and roughly the same amount of time for the herbs, except for the garlic, which if planted in fall, won’t be ready to pick until next summer. And then, it’s going to take a couple weekends of processing and canning that tomato sauce.

So, before we even bring the food into our kitchen to prepare, we have literally waited years for this meal. Suddenly the half-hour or so it takes to put it all together doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

I’ve had a garden many times during my life. I have never been able to commit to growing enough produce to sustain our family through an entire season.

This summer’s experiments with G are more about trying new things and our harvest, since it’s relatively meager, is usually consumed within a few days. Honestly, my main goal is teaching my children to appreciate what it takes to put a meal on the table and how important it is to be a good steward of our resources.

While I’m not ready to commit to raising beef, our little poultry experiment has paid off immensely.

We have the enormous luxury of not being absolutely dependent on the chickens for anything, taking their offerings as more of a gift than an expectation.

I’ve enjoyed letting G experiment with various ways to take care of them. It’s been entertaining to watch him do things the hard way and gradually figure out better ways himself. He’s enjoyed doing things like feeding them various types of vegetables and fruit, and trying to change the colors of their yolks.

His hatching experiment this year yielded a white chicken from a brown egg, although we have several chickens that lay brown eggs, none of them are white.

Our rooster is also a breed that should not have yielded a white chicken from a brown egg, but here we are. It will probably remain a mystery unless we can recreate it and monitor them a little more closely next time, but it’s been a good exercise for his brain.

I hope that all these experiments give him a slightly greater appreciation for what it takes to put dinner on the table every night, even if the ingredients came from a grocery store or another farmers market.

I also hope that the lessons he’s learned about natural pest control (love those ducks) and supporting pollinators spill over into the rest of his life.

As this idea of making America healthy again rages on, I feel like somehow we keep moving in the wrong direction.

There is a big difference between personal health and public health. Somehow there is this idea that everyone just needs to make better choices about what they’re putting into their bodies. The garden has been a wonderful place to learn that it takes more than just putting a healthy plant into the ground to yield a bumper crop of anything a few months later.

We’ve planted identical plants from the same batch of seedlings just a few feet from one another. Some have thrived while others shriveled. Just a little bit too much sun, or being at the end of the line when it comes to where the hose reaches can have a drastic impact on plant’s health and productivity.

Our tomatoes have grown like no tomatoes I’ve ever seen before, primarily because G built an incredible trellis system to support them.

We’ll continue our experimenting through the fall and then plan for bigger and better next year. In the meantime, we’ll enjoy many family dinners together and appreciate the years that went into making them.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News.