Sow a Love of Gardening

Sow a Love of Gardening

Beautiful spring and summer days may find you in the garden, digging, planting, and picking. This year, invite your children along to show them that gardening can be a labor of love—and learning.

They’ll enjoy digging to their hearts’ content, and they just may discover a thing or two about the miracle of seeds; how bees and butterflies are vital pollinators; and that food doesn’t come just from the grocery store.

Older children can help plan the garden plot, mark the planting and harvesting schedule on the calendar, prune plants, and sell the harvest. A garden also offers a great chance for homegrown lessons in math (counting the seeds, plants, and harvest), planning (scheduling the planting, fertilizing, watering, and harvesting), economics (buying the seeds, fertilizer, tools, and selling the harvest), and charity (sharing the garden’s excess).

During the growing season, equipped with the correct tools and enough imagination, children are great weed warriors. Make a game of it—see who can gather the most weeds, the tallest weed, and the weed with the longest root. Harvest time is the most rewarding adventure, as each child helps pick the fruits of his or her labor.

Reon Cowan of Eagle Mountain, Utah, grew up gardening with her father. “We did it as a family,” Cowan recalls. She cherished the time working in the garden because “it was time spent with Dad.”

At planting time, her father would dig, let the kids put the plants in the holes, and then fill the holes with water. “We always loved to help plant and then play in the mud,” Cowan says.

Her father, Nathan Noyes of Taylorsville, Utah, says he also grew up gardening with his father. It just keeps getting passed down through the generations. “I tried to build a desire in my children,” he says.

Gardening always has been a family project, Noyes says. “We raise everything we eat, and we make games out of it,” he says. “We also follow the seasons with life: Things come up in the spring, ripen in the summer, we can our fruits and vegetables in the fall, and in the winter we have our food and eat what we raised.”

Encourage your children in the garden by letting them do what interests them, Cowan suggests. “If they love beans, let them be in charge of the beans,” she says. “My kids love to take a seed and grow it. It becomes theirs, and they get to be the boss of it.”

Carrots, berries, and pumpkins are just a few things that are favorites for kids to grow in the garden, she says. Or they may want to plant and pick flowers for the dinner table.

Take time to sow a love of gardening in your children and nurture an appreciation of nature’s bounty.

Debra Hart is a freelance writer and gardener from Eagle Mountain, Utah.

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