Gardening with Children

Gardening with children is a great way to get young people interested in gardening.

The Importance of Gardening with Children

Did you garden alongside your mom or dad when you were little? How did you first become interested in gardening?

Never underestimate the importance of gardening with children.

These past two weekends, I had the rare experience of having a small child in the home, my 7-year-old nephew. His parents do not garden. They live in a modest suburban home with a lawn and a shrub or two and lots of concrete sidewalks, walkway and patio…nature just doesn’t interest them.

I don’t understand that, because it feels like throughout my entire life, I’ve loved nature. I remember as a child marveling at the clouds and jumping into piles of leaves on the lawn in the autumn when my older brothers raked them up. I remember my mom teaching me the names of the birds sitting on the telephone wires as she pushed my stroller along – wait! That’s the answer, isn’t it?

It’s our moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas and all the other grownups in our lives who either taught us to love the world around us or ignore it and focus on the ephemeral.

Who Taught Me to Garden?

My mom gave me a sense of curiosity about nature, and my dad’s love of science and his amateur science experiments, like the time he tried to grow ferns on a brick from spores he picked from a fern growing in the backyard, instilled a healthy curiosity in my mind and heart as a child.

My dad gardened, my grandma gardened, and my next door neighbor gardened; gardening was as natural to me as breathing. Knowing the names of trees and shrubs, flowers and birds, insects and everything in between was deemed important in my household.  Knowing the name of the current hot rock band or whatever else was ‘hip’ was deemed unimportant.

So many kids today are growing up completely oblivious to nature. It’s not just city kids. City kids can be very keen on nature too. I remember walking through Central Park on a bright summer’s day when I worked near Lincoln Center and watching children playing near a pond. They were pointing at the ducks and feeding them bread and they were loving every minute of it. There were little gardens in Manhattan too sandwiched in alleyways between buildings, community gardens made from whatever space was available.  There’s nature in the middle of the city, too.

Passing the Gardening “Bug” Along

My nephew doesn’t live near anyone who gardens, and his parents don’t really care about gardening. They mow their lawn and that’s it.  Their neighborhood is like that; we’ve visited them several times, and I don’t remember anyone planting flowers at all.

When we took everyone out to the vegetable garden to show them what was growing, my nephew grew excited for the first time during his visit. “Look mom! Peppers!” he shouted, running to point at the peppers.

We let him pull a carrot and he accidentally pulled two. As soon as he got into the house, he wanted to scrub the carrot and eat it.  He ate two raw carrots right there standing at the sink! Can you imagine if you said, “Honey, would you like raw carrots?” He’d probably demand potato chips. Yet you let him pull his own vegetables, and he was so excited to taste the carrot.

Introduces New Foods

He tasted beets for the first time too. He didn’t know what a beet was, and he pulled one for me.  He marveled at the pretty purple color. I happened to have some leftover ones in the fridge already cooked in a Harvard sauce, which is sweet and sour, and we gave him one to taste cold.  “Good?” my husband asked. “Good!” he declared around a purple mouthful.

Understands Where Food Comes From

Every garden bed he peered into he squealed with excitement. “Strawberries! Tomatoes! What’s this?” pointing at the Swiss Chard – “And that?”

That’s another thing about the importance of gardening with children – it teaches kids where their food comes from (other than the supermarket.) The begin to connect the fact that food comes from gardens or farms.

Showing a child where his food comes from, teaching him that it is okay to leave bugs alone and that some bugs are good, and teaching him to compost – which he got the hang of very quickly, knowing what to put into the kitchen compost bucket and what not to – gave me a good sense of having passed along a bit of wisdom, along with one scrubbed carrot in his lunch sack to take with him in the car.  It was like I got to pass along a bit of my grandma, a bit of my dad, a bit of Mr. Hoffman, and a bit of the joy I feel for my garden, too.