Gardening is kids’ stuff
You’re never too young to start learning where your food comes from, says Nadia Lim, whose two young children are crucial to their family food-gathering.
On the face of it, gardening has a linear narrative: you plant a seed, it grows, is harvested, the plant dies back and the gathered seeds are reborn again the following season. But in reality, growing your own food can sometimes feel like a mighty quest filled with twists, turns and unexpected adventures.
Growing 80 per cent of our own food, especially down here on the farm, where we grow crops, vegetables and raise animals, has taught me so much about resourcefulness and the resilience of the natural world.
It’s very cool watching my two young boys learn about how things grow by tagging along with us in the garden or on the farm. I know our kids are super lucky to have this opportunity, but I’m a firm believer in the importance of this kind of learning for everyone.
I strongly believe this education should be part of the school curriculum. How could anyone argue that knowing how to feed yourself good, nutritious food is not an essential life skill?
Everyone should know the basics of how to grow their own fruit and vegetables, whether they live on a farm with acres of space, or in a small apartment.
I don’t think anyone can disagree that having an understanding of these principles and processes is essential for the future of the human race and our planet. That’s why I’m involved with the Garden to Table programme, which helps bring growing, harvesting and cooking education to primary schools across Aotearoa.
Even though we have all the information in the world at our fingertips, people are becoming less knowledgeable about how the food they eat is raised or grown. It’s scary, but we have people in this country making rules about when farmers should plant their crops when they haven’t grown a single vegetable of their own in their life. And I can tell you from experience, when it comes to the natural world, more often than not theory differs from practice.
Although “seasonality” is often bandied around, the reality is that access to imported or hot-house grown fruit and vegetables means lots of people now expect everything to be available all year round. If you’re truly keen to live a more sustainable, less wasteful life, growing some of your own vegetables ticks more boxes than any other solution I know of.
If you grow your own food, there’s no packaging and no food miles. You’re in charge of what goes into your garden, so you can decide to avoid chemicals or artificial fertilisers. There’s no food waste because you pick what you need, when you need it, and any scraps can be recycled back into the ground via compost or a worm farm. Plus, the more plants you have in the ground, the more carbon is stored.
If the sustainability angle isn’t enough to convince you, maybe the health and wellbeing benefits will.
Improved access to homegrown fruit and vegetables means you’re more likely to eat more plants. They’ll be fresher, so they’re likely to be more nutritious and better quality than produce that’s spent a long time in transit before living out its days under supermarket lighting.
You don’t even have to eat what you grow to receive a boost to your mental and physical health: many robust scientific studies have found that gardening is good for you, thanks to the greater connection with nature, level of required exercise, exposure to vitamin D and increased social bonding.
Perhaps the greatest thing about growing your own fruit and vegetables, along with the culinary possibilities, is that you gain an education; an understanding of the natural world’s cycles and processes. And that, to me, is priceless.
As the Chinese proverb says: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime”. Educating kids about how to grow food will play a key part in our future.
How could anyone argue that knowing how to feed yourself good, nutritious food is not an essential life skill?
Nadia Lim writes a weekly column for about her experiences on her Central Otago farm,where she is pursuing her vision for sustainable, ethical farming.