Breathe new life into gardening
Getting your little sprout involved in gardening can be both fun and rewarding. Children learn about growing food, where food comes from and about the natural world. The family spends time together in the garden and everyone reaps the benefits of harvesting fresh vegetables, herbs and fruits they have grown themselves.
Getting children involved in the garden can be fun for the whole family, says Calgary Horticultural Society garden animator Janet Melrose, who offers several suggestions to help intrigue your child about heading out into the garden:
Choose seeds that are quick germinating and quick-growing, because “children want to see something happening quickly.”
Choose plants that are easy to grow in Calgary’s climate, and that taste great. “You want your child to be able to harvest edibles and eat them right there in garden, when they’re the best, freshest and just picked out of the ground,” Melrose says.
For instance, “Tom Thumb lettuces “are small and taste wonderful, little finger carrots explode in your mouth with taste and the Round Romeo carrot is very sweet.” Other good choices are cherry tomatoes such as Sun Gold, and snap peas, tender enough that the pods can be eaten as well as the peas inside. Melrose also suggests growing unusuallooking veggies such as kohlrabi, which “looks like a spaceship — a Sputnik. Kohlrabi is in the same plant family as broccoli, excpt that instead of eating the flower, as you do with broccoli, you eat the stem.” You can steam kohlrabi or slice it thinly and eat it fresh, says Melrose, who enjoys eating raw sticks of freshly cut kohlrabi.
Grow colourful vegetables. For example, instead of green beans, go for purple or spotted beans, “because they look funky and have a great taste.”
Finally, choose plants that will attract “all the butterflies, bees, dragonflies and everything else that hums and buzzes in the garden.”
Through gardening, Melrose explains, children can learn about how bees pollinate plants, and how the many other beneficial bugs, such as ladybugs, help both the garden and the gardener.