5 Steps To Growing a Kids’ Garden

One of my fav photos: Ocean of Green - photo by Newscoma

I grew up picking butterbeans, fat red tomatoes, sweet corn and slender green onions from my grandparents’ vegetable plot across the street from their home.  They’d retired from the farm and moved with my aunt to a city house.   No more cows, chickens and well water for these guys.  They did, though, take their garden expertise with them.  A neighbor owned an extra lot.  They grew the vegtables and shared their bounty in exchange for use of the land.

Not only did they share the produce, my grandparents shared their appreciation of growing things.  My aunt, meanwhile, graced the yard with color and variety because she is the flower person.  She is still one big green thumb.  Anything she puts in the ground grows.  Send her a plant for her birthday.  She’ll plant it out back, and it will multiply by the thousands in the next year!  But that is another post.

So, I had a great time growing up of playing in the dirt, gawking at the gross, ugly worms and bugs, relishing the smell of fresh, green onions at the table, shelling peas in a shiny bowl on the porch and sticking my nose up at the pickled maroon-colored beets offered at about every meal.   It must have been a natural progression from all of those childhood memories to now crave sharing a garden experience with my eight year-old.  I wanted her to dig in the dirt and know where vegetables begin.  An idea sprouted.

Five Steps to Start a Kids’ Garden:

Get a plot.  I wrote in an earlier post that there would be a reason our company stayed put in our current location and didn’t move to my dream location.  Maybe the extra acreage next door was part of that plan.  No longer just another acre to mow, this plot of land has a purpose!

 

Get a tractor.  Great ideas turn into plans when you have the right tools and a father-in-law who loves to work on the tractor.  He puts in the lawns when he and Tim, my husband, build a home.  He plowed up and essentially set the dimensions of our garden.  He plowed the first plot.  Tim plowed up the adjacent watermelon and pumpkin patch.

Dream a bit.  I remember when I bought my first house. I looked through home magazines dreaming that my rooms could look just like the ones in Veranda magazine.  Now, I was gazing through gardening magazines and catalogs coveting lush, green, overflowing gardens with neat paths and bean teepees.  The activity was enough to get the creative juices flowing.  Showed Tim what I wanted, and he laid it out on paper.  Then we took string and flags and made it happen.

Borrow from the library and everyone else.  Gardening for Dummies,  Jerry Baker’s Great Green Book of Garden Secrets , as well as the NGA’s pamphlet, Steps to a Bountiful Kids’ Garden and Food Fiesta pages from the UT Extension office go with me everywhere these days.  Wading through pages of bugs that could annilihate a garden overnight overwhelmed me one day;  however, the lush garden dream transported me right on past that roadblock.  I’m also listening to and keeping a record of all the old wives’ tales I hear.  My father in law, Mickey, said his mom always inserted a nail beside each of her transplants to keep the cutworms away.  Will it work?  I don’t know, but it was an easy task to follow on the broccoli plants.   We’ll see.

Find a kid.  Share is a buzzword now.  On Facebook, you can hit the Share button and send the latest info or link to your friends.  I want to share with my daughter  and her friends the love and appreciation for growing things that my family passed on.  I want to do it in real life and not only with photos on the computer.  There is therapy in this endeavor and a handful of laughs.  Wait until I tell you about laying out an organic weed barrier (old newspapers) during twenty mph wind gusts.  A 48 year-old woman frantically chasing wildly tumbling newspapers across an open field does not a pretty picture make.  But that is another story. 

Cynics, stay away.  My garden may evolve into one big dust bowl.  The hungry bugs may munch everything and leave us nothing but the dirt we started with.  My back may give out from laying out all that newspaper.  But, I may see my daughter’s eyes light up when she pulls that first ripe tomato!  We will see what grows.

Great Resource:  National Gardening Association

Advertisement