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Teach Your Kids Gardening and They’ll Thank You For it Later

Working with your family in a flower or vegetable garden is a great way to pass on skills to your children that will stay with them for a lifetime.

kid in pumpkin patch
My daughter in a pumpkin patch

Working together in a home garden can be a wonderful family activity. It’s a chance to learn, have fun, get your hands dirty and talk with each other in a completely neutral environment. My Mother taught me to garden. Her Mother, a Welsh immigrant, and her father, an Irish immigrant, taught her to garden. It seems like there’s always been a garden in my life and I’m sure our family history of home gardening goes back generations in Wales and Ireland. My Father’s side of the family farmed for generations in Ohio and Pennsylvania (my Grandfather was the last), but eventually abandoned it for economic reasons. So you might say growing things and working the earth is in my blood, maybe even genetically imprinted.

One of the greatest joys a parent can experience is passing on a personal skill set to their children. It’s a proud moment when you see your child express interest and participate in the same things you’re interested in.

But a home garden involves lots of hard and sometimes back-breaking work, which we all know is anathema to children – TV and video games, even homework requires a lot less physical output. So how to get them to develop a healthy interest in getting their hands dirty and growing carrots?

The secret to convincing kids to garden

The secret to success is to be teaching when your child doesn’t realize you’re teaching.

I badgered my son for years to help me in the garden, from the time he was about fourteen.  As we did the heavy work of digging and hoeing side by side, I always explained WHY we were doing this work and what benefit it would have on the vegetables, fruit and soil.

I thought that it was going in one ear and out the other, but two summers ago, when I actually paid him to dig my garden (he needed the money), I listened in awe as he explained every step in scientific detail to his girlfriend, who sat close by. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

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Last spring, I pressed my teenage daughter into service when I decided that my flower beds just weren’t wide enough and needed to be increased by about one foot all the way around the house. It wasn’t until I was two days in and only halfway done that I realized what a monumental undertaking this was (remove the brick border; measure and mark; dig the new area; dump compost on it; work it all in with a rake; replace the brick border; mulch the new area; start again). I had my daughter do the smallest part of the garden and she looked like she was dreading it the entire time, complaining about the sweat and the dirt. But later in the summer, when I brought up the subject of how “we” widened the beds, she pointed to the area she had worked on and claimed it as hers. How do you spell Proud Papa?

Make gardening a fun family activity

So if you’re trying to impart your gardening wisdom to your kids, make it a family activity. As you work, describe why you’re doing what you’re doing, show them how to properly plant a bulb; your little tricks when you plant annuals; why some vegetable seeds are planted deeper than others; why a raised garden bed is better than a flat row. Show them the proper way and time to harvest vegetables; let them climb the tree to grab the pears you can’t reach.

It may appear that they don’t care, but trust me – at least some of it is sinking in. Later in the season, when those plants are in their glory, invite your kids to smell the basil they helped you plant; the roses they helped you prune; the hyacinths blooming from the bulbs you planted the previous fall, and let them know how especially good those fresh garden tomatoes are in the spaghetti sauce on your table.

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I’ll end with my favorite garden memory. When my daughter was about seven years old, she started ballet lessons and wouldn’t take off her pink tutu for weeks. I was an apartment dweller in Boston at that time and missed gardening immensely. So I loaded the kids into the car and drove to my Aunt’s house in Vermont, who had a huge garden attached to an old farmhouse. The kids and I worked that garden pulling weeds and harvesting vegetables and I’ll never forget the surprise on my daughter’s face when she discovered an absolutely HUGE squash. She pulled it up and held it in her arms, treasuring it. A tiny, dirty gardener in a ballerina tutu, holding a squash. A vision I’ll never forget.

1 thought on “Teach Your Kids Gardening and They’ll Thank You For it Later”

  1. I grew up on a farm in Ontario where we had a huge home garden and it was a family thing when it came to weeding. I didn’t care for it when I was a kid but sure loved eating all the goodies we grew. It wasn’t until I was in my late 40s that we had a place of our own to start gardening. It’s been great.

    Our son was pretty much grown up by then but I didn’t get his help in the year before he moved out and he did get to enjoy the benefits, so hopefully some day he will call me and tell me he has started a home garden.

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