Passing down a love of gardening
“Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden?” — Robert Brault
Full disclosure: Being born in 1935 into a family where large gardens were a necessity, I did not enjoy gardening. All summer there was a push to grow and preserve food for the coming winter. Our mother canned fruits and vegetables, and on the shelves in the basement there was a colorful assortment of her hard work.
Our job as children was to help plant and to do the endless weeding. Our father, a bit of a taskmaster, would assign rows to be weeded by the time he returned home from work and we would watch anxiously as he examined our handiwork. I don’t ever remember hearing a “good job” from him. Perhaps we didn’t do as thorough a job as we thought, but it would have felt good to hear it.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to enjoy gardening. I had a large family to feed, but I didn’t have the same pressure that my parents had to provide for winter meals. I canned and froze food because I thought it was a better quality than storebought. Did my children enjoy the garden? It’s probably not one of the things they look back on fondly!
It is seeing my grandchildren gardening with their children that has made me realize what a wonderful family experience gardening can become. To help tell that story, I asked my granddaughter Adrienne to share some of her experiences in gardening with her children, Molly and Noah. Here’s what she wrote:
“Getting my kids to eat vegetables can be a challenge, but I find they eat more veggies when they’ve done the work to grow them themselves. Every year they get to pick a new veggie or fruit to try and grow. Some of the attempts are successful, some not, but when the children participate in the process of prepping the soil, planting, watering, and even pruning and keeping things tidy, they have a better appreciation for the final product and are more prone to tasting the ‘fruits of their labor.’
“They beam with pride when the vegetable or fruit is finally ripe and ready for picking, and are even happier when they realize how delicious it is!
“In particular, they love the freedom of walking over to our small vegetable garden and grabbing a tomato or sugar snap pea to eat fresh off the plant. They also love picking blackberries from the vines.
“We plant parsley but never get to enjoy eating much of it because the swallowtail butterflies love to lay their eggs on it. But then we get to watch the caterpillars grow! We count them every day and then have a search party to see where they’ve decided to turn into a chrysalis.
“Planting our vegetable garden is something the kids look forward to doing every year! They also love to help in our butterfly garden and get it ready for the pollinators to arrive, and of course our beloved hummingbirds that come back year after year. I hope that these will become favorite summertime memories.
“The love of gardening was passed down to me from my grandma and my mother, and I hope that by teaching my own children the beauty of gardening that it will continue to be passed down from them for generations to come.”
Giving children a small plot of their own is important; even some containers on the porch or patio will do.
If you have a child or grandchild with special needs, gardening can be a wonderful shared experience.
Note: As I recover from hand surgery, several readers have accepted my invitation to fill this space for me and share their own garden experiences. Many thanks to Shirley Walton for this week’s guest column. The community garden she helped to create at Tel Hai Retirement Community in Honey Brook, PA provides a bounty of vegetables and is a haven for pollinators.