By Dani Greer
“Did your parents ever tell you to go ahead and get dirty and have fun when you were a kid?” my husband recently asked me. We’d been out gardening after a rain and were muddied up good after a few hours of turning over dirt and planting seeds. It’s our form of unstructured play, getting into the garden and away from our desks.
“Are you kidding?” I replied. “Quite the opposite.”
Of course, it didn’t keep us from getting dirty anyway, and the moms spent a good deal of time cleaning up our messes. I sometimes think how much fun it might have been if our parents had gotten out there with us and helped us play.
Others have mused along the same lines. In her perennial favorite gardening book, Carrots Love Tomatoes, Louise Riotte includes a chapter titled, A Child’s Garden, complete with a plan for all kinds of fun features. In a special see-through fenced area, she maps out a climbing tree, a child’s vegetable garden, a paved racing track around an ash tree, gym equipment, a wading pool, a sandbox, and a playhouse.
The climbing tree would have a tree house, of course, and did you know you could grow grapevines up the tree? What a treat in late summer to sit up in the tree snacking on your own homegrown grapes.
How about a purple pole bean teepee made of tree branches, covered with bean vines that you can harvest later? Add a blue corn forest for hide-and-go-seek games. If you have boys who aren’t too fond of their vegetables, helping them grow their own Big Red Warty Thing squash or Dinosaur kale might be just the way to get them interested in new tastes, especially if they’ve grown them in their own garden. Oh, and grow some pumpkins for Halloween jack-o-lanterns.
Don’t forget the garden tools for little hands. Even Target sells them now, but we think the For Small Hands website has the coolest selection.
A special garden for the children will be so much endless fun, think about including solar lights so that outdoor play times can extend into dusk. You might even find you enjoy the time outdoors, too. When summer is over and the weather gets cold, bring the good times into your house with a project for next season’s garden – a worm farm! The kids will love their new pets and it’ll give parents all kinds of teaching opportunities as well as worm compost for the next spring garden.
What do you think of the worm farm idea? Leave us your vote in the comments – either yum or ewwww! We’ll have a random drawing for the award-winning book, What Does It Mean to Be Green? (which just won a Gold Benjamin Franklin Award).
Even the ewwwws can play to win!
Even the ewwwws can play to win!
10 comments:
EEWWWWW!! But I'm all for getting dirty, so I guess it goes with the territory-still an EEWWWWW however.
Growing up, my cousins had a garden that they were extremely proud of. Gardening is a great thing for kids because they can actually SEE the results of their hard work. Thanks for the article, Dani!
I confess although I admire people with a knack for gardening, it is not an area where I excel. I do, however, excel at creating award-winning children's media, and What Does It Mean To Be Green? just won a GOLD Benjamin Franklin Award in the ebook category! Thanks for the great post, Dani.
This is great! My kids are all into gardening as I recently set a side a portion of the backyard for them to plant things. And even though I recycle, they still catch me s I throw stuff away. They tell me its not enough to separate trash, I need to actually reuse stuff. They're so much smarter than I was at that age.
Stephen, cool! It sounds like you're playing a part in all their smartness.
YESS!!! when our disabled son gets home from school, the first thing he does is dash for the back yard and his shovel, so that he can dig for worms. And he shows me every single one. We work hard to keep them out of his pocket. When people ask what he's doing, diligently digging all over the back yard, we simply tell them he's worm farming.
Great article Dani. It brought me back to my childhood and how much fun I had at my grandma's house! She had all kind of flowers and trees on her backyard! Mango, avocado, pomegranate, orange, lemon, coconut!! Oh so yummy to have all that fresh at her house!! Good memories! Yes for getting dirty! Yummy!
We've had a worm farm for years, although we had to replace the worms after Black Saturday and the week of 40 degree C days. Poor things didn't stand a chance in the continuous heat.
:-(
I enjoyed your post, Dani. Growing up, my family and my grandparents always had a vegetable garden. My brother and I would help my Dad prepare the soil, plant, and harvest the delicious vegetables. We planted tomatoes, green beans, peppers, zuchini, and even fresh herbs. I remember even planting corn a few times. There's nothing like picking fresh vegetables from the garden and eating them that evening for dinner.
Gardening is at the top of my most favorite things to do list. I would have to say eeewwwww (aka: no way) to a worm farm inside my house! I figure I've paid my dues by tolerating (barely) a pet rat that my kids had...for years, so nothing smaller then a 65 pound cattle dog in this house! Thank you for this wonderful post Dani.
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