Gardening with Children

EP186: What if you could cultivate in your children a love for growing things? Listen in as we explore the numerous benefits of gardening with children. From improving mood and reducing stress to fostering a love of fresh, homegrown food, gardening offers a treasure trove of rewards. In this episode, Jean shares personal anecdotes from her own family's time spent on a local CSA farm and also time gardening in the backyard where her kids learned the value of meaningful work and developed a passion for nature and healthful eating. You'll also get practical tips and creative project ideas to kickstart or enhance your gardening journey. Whether you have a large yard or just a small space, this episode is packed with inspiration and actionable advice to help you cultivate joy and growth in your family's gardening life. Grab your sun hat and gardening gloves—let's make some unforgettable memories together!

Find the Show Notes Here (www.artofhomeschooling.com/episode186)

Inspired at Home Membership (www.artofhomeschooling.com/inspiredathome)

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

You're listening to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we help parents cultivate creativity and connection at home. I'm your host, jean Miller, and here on this podcast you'll find stories and inspiration to bring you the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Let's begin. Hello homeschooling friend, and welcome to the podcast. Hello homeschooling friend, and welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to bring you this episode on a topic near and dear to my heart. Today, we're talking all about the rewards of gardening with children. In this episode, I want to encourage you to give gardening a try or to expand your gardening activities. This season. I'll share with you some of the many benefits of gardening, my favorite projects, strategies for involving children and some of my favorite resources for gardening with children. And if you don't have this space feel like you don't have any space for gardening or haven't started a garden plot keep listening, because you can grow so many plants in small raised beds. You can add a few vegetable plants into your existing landscape or plant in large pots on your deck, patio or even balcony. There are some plants, like radishes, zucchini and herbs that are fairly easy to grow and they give you a great return on your investment. They grow relatively quickly and kids can get a lot of joy out of that. Let's start with the benefits of gardening with children. Older adults often think of gardening as a hobby, but gardening can be strenuous work. The rewards are plentiful, though, and as parents, we want to model doing meaningful work in the world for our children to see. Here are some of the big benefits of gardening with children. Gardening improves mood and reduces stress, promotes meaningful work, encourages healthy eating, teaches environmental awareness, provides sensory development and allows for family bonding. Those are just a few of the many benefits of gardening with children.

Speaker 1: 2:50

When my kiddos were little, I managed the volunteer crew for a CSA at a local farm. If you're not familiar with this idea, csa stands for community-supported agriculture, where a group of people or families pool their resources to support a farm or farmers to grow their produce. The CSA at Silver Creek Farm was a huge part of my kiddos' childhoods because for six months out of the year for about 10 years, we would spend every Thursday on the farm. We'd get up early, I'd pack lunches and snacks lots of snacks and water bottles, sun hats, sunscreen, and off we'd go to the farm. When we arrived, the kids would help me with farm chores and a bit of planting, weeding, and then they'd head off to explore and play among the hay bales or at the edge of the woods. While I did some farm work They'd find salamanders and snakes, sit with the baby chicks in the barn and feed the goats, and they loved riding on the tractor with Farmer Ted. We'd arrive home at the end of the day completely exhausted but happy, and my children would sleep so well that night. My kids also ate a variety of foods fresh from the garden, like kale, squash and fresh-picked blueberries. My children are now grown and they still talk about their memories from those farm days. One of my kiddos and his wife now belong to a CSA where they live, another is into mushroom foraging and the third works in a coffee shop in an animal rescue mission. They all three love to cook fresh food and I can see the influences of our time spent gardening and outdoors when they were growing up.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Back here at home, we've had some favorite garden projects over the years. One of our family traditions is to plant flowers together on Mother's Day a super simple activity. It's the perfect time of year here in Northern Ohio to plant annuals, and so we've made it a tradition to go to the garden center together, pick out the flowers and come home to plant them on that Sunday in May. One year we planted a pizza garden with tomatoes, basil, oregano and spinach. Another family favorite from our garden is making pesto. The whole family loves pesto and it's always a sign that summer has begun when we make the first batch. We even like to eat pesto on toast for breakfast. Besides growing food you can eat, you can also find other purposeful projects in the garden, like growing calendula for making a salve or mint to dry for making tea.

Speaker 1: 5:51

Just like we focus on making utilitarian projects with our handwork, gardening can involve making something that can be used by the entire family. Another idea is to learn what the helpful bugs and hurtful bugs are in the garden. We can help foster kindness to all the creepy crawly insects and encourage our kiddos to hold worms, pill bugs, ladybugs and other small creatures with respect and reverence. If you have to kill a garden pest, can you feed it to the chickens or leave it on a leaf plate for birds to eat. We can also say thank you to all the creatures and plants in the garden. Here's a beautiful verse for small creatures Dear Father, hear and bless thy beasts and singing birds, and guard with tenderness small things that have no words. It can also be great fun to do a lot of singing in the garden.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Here are two favorites. The first is, inch by Inch, the Garden Song. It starts out like this inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow. All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground. I'll be sure to put the lyrics in the show notes for the entire song for you, along with a link to a recording of this wonderful song, and you can find the show notes at artofhomeschoolingcom, slash episode 186. I'll also link to the Growing Song by Mary Tienes Shuneman, another wonderful song, particularly for young children. And here is a poem that we love called the Good Farmer, the glossy worm below the ground. Doth, twist and turn and chop and churn and till and toil and mill and moil up all the soil without a sound.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Now for some simple strategies for how to involve your children in the gardening. Have child-sized tools on hand and available for your kiddos. Have hoses, buckets with scoops or cups and watering cans available. Children love playing in water. Have a space that your kiddos can just play in mess up, do whatever they want. We had a mud pit in our backyard for years. Make sure there's plenty of shade for respite from the sun. It's nice to have a sun umbrella or beach tent for shade out in your yard. They're portable and the perfect place to set up a sandbox or bean tub, a wading pool or water table for play in the shade. Gather sun hats, sunscreen and water bottles for each family member before heading outdoors. And here's an important one prepare snacks ahead of time to help avoid meltdowns. Harvest and eat the food you grow and let your children help decide what to cook with the produce. Create a rhythm where children help you when you first get out into the garden and then are free to go play while you tend the garden. You might give each child a little garden chore to do when they first get outside, but then let them choose after that. As parents, we can be working in the garden while our kids are free to dip in and out of work and play. When my team member, sarah ran a CSA on their property, her little ones would stay close and nearby while the older kiddos would venture farther away to play.

Speaker 1: 9:51

As we wrap up, I want to mention a few favorite resources. Now don't forget to check the show notes at artofhomeschoolingcom slash episode 186, for a more complete list of gardening books. Roots, shoots, buckets and Boots by Sharon Lovejoy is an all-time favorite activity book for gardening, with project ideas like growing a sunflower house, planting a pizza garden. Another book, blue Potatoes, orange Tomatoes, by Rosalyn Creasy is a beautiful book about growing unusual vegetables and can be something that is different and really fun for you to do with your family. I also recommend two books by Lois Ehlert, particularly for the younger crowd. One is Planting a Rainbow and the other Growing Vegetable Soup, where you can plant all the ingredients and then, when you harvest, make soup from everything you've grown For read-alouds.

Speaker 1: 10:54

One of our all-time family favorite is the Gardener by Sarah Stewart. It's about a young girl who goes to live with an uncle during the Depression and discovers the joys of rooftop gardening. The illustrations in this book are glorious and all ages will enjoy this sweet story. I love this book so much that my friend Allison and I created a book hearth literature guide for planning a whole month main lesson block around this one book, using the gardener. Check out the show notes for a link to that too.

Speaker 1: 11:33

And finally, I want to mention the Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, for another wonderful family read aloud. We read this book together, curled up on the couch, every spring to welcome a new season. It's about how the characters in the story come to life just as the garden does in the springtime. I'll also link to a few other podcast episodes you might be interested in listening to if you're loving this topic of gardening with your children. And there you have it Lots of benefits to gardening with children, ideas for projects, strategies for involving them and favorite resources to inspire you to get outside and gardening Time to go, grab those trowels and do some digging in the dirt. That's all for today, my friend, but here's what I want you to remember Rather than perfection, let's focus on connection. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast. Thank you.