“If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day.

“If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.”

This concept was one I found true this summer when a friend of mine decided that my family needed a vegetable garden.

A few years ago, I met “Nick” while covering the Carbon County commissioners’ meeting. He attended the meetings regularly and we started chatting.

We talked about quite a few things — public transportation in the area, truck routes, his time in the military and his adventures throughout his life, which took him to several states before landing in Carbon County.

During one of our conversations, I shared with him that my son’s teacher gave him sunflower seeds and that he was thrilled because three of them bloomed.

The next spring, Nick handed me three bottles — one filled with omega-3 pills and two filled with different types of sunflower seeds — as well as instructions on how to plant and grow the seeds and feed the roots to ensure larger crops.

We followed the instructions and the seeds began to sprout, however, a bunny or chipmunk thought the sprouts looked delicious and ate them before anything grew large enough to bloom.

Fast forward to this spring, and Nick took his knowledge of gardening one step further.

Each week, he told me he was starting seedlings for a garden at my house. At first, I didn’t believe him.

Then, he called me and asked if I could stop over. When I did, he handed me several garden supplies to create a plot for the kids to learn how to grow and care for crops.

The seedlings he supplied included various types of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, a pumpkin and, what started it all, sunflowers.

Over the last few months, my family has carefully tended the garden, and the kids have been intrigued to watch just how cucumber plants vine out and take over large areas and how the sunflowers were growing taller then them.

I also learned that you can’t put tomato and pepper plants in with a cucumber plant because those plants get overtaken by the vines.

And at the same time, my husband saved his late mother’s mint plant, which up until this year had been limping along in the spot where we had originally planted it.

It has been a fun and educational experience, one I honestly don’t think we would have decided to do on our own due to the clay-based soils we have on our property. But apparently, Nick knew what to do without even seeing the ground and educated us on grow box gardening.

The vegetable season is now coming to an end, as cooler temperatures cut back crop production and plants begin to die off, but the kids are already talking about what they want to grow next gardening season.

So what will we plant next year? We don’t know.

But what we do know is teaching a person, even if they didn’t think they wanted to learn, will provide more life lessons that help enrich your life, much like you have to enrich the soil before planting.