Kathy,

Well, gardening with kids is more fun than gardening without them!

First, from the perspective of once being a gardening kid myself.....I remember working in the yard and veggie garden with my dad when I was a kid and I always loved every minute of it. I had grandparents and aunts and uncles who gardened, some of them on quite a large scale, so gardening was just something that was a part of our life. When I was a kid, it was just part of our routine to sit on the porch and shell peas or snap beans or whatever. And, you know, every conversation with a gardening relative in the harvest season included a line like "I put up 12 quarts of tomatoes today".....or whatever. It never occurred to me, growing up, that everyone didn't have veggie gardens, fruit trees, berry bramble or bushes, etc., in their own backyards. Imagine how shocked I was to learn that some people had to buy their jams and jellies!!

I also remember that I always thought home-grown flowers were the prettiest! (I still do.) I'll forever be grateful to my dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles and also neighborhood friends who gardened and were always willing to answer my questions and share the gardening passion with me. How well I remember all those "little old lady" gardeners in my neighborhood who worked outside in their cotton dresses, practical shoes, wide-brimmed hats and gardening gloves.....and now, except that I generally work in blue jeans and t-shirts, I guess I am one of those ladies. (They weren't really "little old ladies", although as a child, that's how I thought of them.) Most all of my gardening relatives and the neighbors I grew up with are gone now, although my youngest uncle is still alive and well and gardening in East Texas, but I will always have my precious memories of them and their gardens!

My son, who is in his 20s now, probably cannot remember a time when we didn't garden. We always had veggies and fruit trees, and built our first water garden when he was only about 8 or 10 years old. I remember how fascinated he was when our order of pond plants and bullfrog tadpoles (from Lily Pons in Houston) arrived and we "planted" that first water garden. Later, he, our nephew and my DH hand-dug a second lily pond in that yard, and then we had a third in a large, round galvanized stock tank, Between the ponds and the swimming pool, our whole backyard in Fort Worth was pretty much water, with veggies in one relatively small area, and fruit trees in another.

When we moved to the country, our then-teenaged son was a tremendous help in building the raised beds and planting all kinds of stuff. He still pays close attention to what I grow even though he is busy and not around the house much. Some of his favorite things in his younger years included growing all kinds of things on teepees.....gourds, mini-pumpkins, pole beans, morning glories, moon flowers, etc. Of course, the teepees had to be large enough that he and his friends could play inside of them!! He also loved the process of raising pickling cucumbers and turning them into pickles. Making strawberry jam was a favorite activity when he was younger, as was picking all kinds of produce, but especially peaches and blackberries.

Nowadays, his time is pretty occupied with firefighting and paramedic school and the young woman who will one day be his wife, but he still is very helpful....especially if I need for someone to come kill a venomous snake in the garden, or chase a bobcat out of the garden! Of course, he willingly eats food from the garden, and cooks with it as well.

He's always been interested in the older heirloom varieties that come in "odd" colors....like black tomatoes or purple potatoes. In fact, his fiancee' recently made mashed potatoes from some All-Blue Potatoes I'd grown this spring, and they both thought having lilac-colored mashed potatoes was pretty special. (EVERYONE, adult or child, always seems to love veggies that are unusual colors....like orange eggplants or red-fleshed potatoes or white pumpkins, or whatever.) Since my "little boy" is now a professional firefighter, he's turned into quite an accomplished cook and, during his first year in the fire station, he was constantly coming home and trying out new recipes on us....and this often involved veggies and herbs right from the garden. I think cooking at work broadened his appreciation of having the ingredients growing right out in the yard!

Over the years, we've shared our garden with the children, and now--the grandchildren--of our friends. It is always fun to see the delight on a young child's face when he finds a ripe watermelon, or picks a cherry tomato off the vine and eats it right there. Often, the bugs and butterflies in the garden are just as fascinating to these kids, since a lot of them grow up in very nice neighborhoods where everything is very neat and precise and lots of pesticides are used and, as a consequence, you don't see a lot of dragonflies or bees or lizards or butterflies or toads or whatever. Our garden, growing in reckless abandon and full of all kinds of creatures is a wonderland for a lot of "city kids" who've never been around a garden.

Although our son didn't seem all that interested in the veggie garden during his later high school years (what with school activities, a job, a car, and girls.....), it suddenly became a VERY popular place with him and his friends during whatever year it was that they had to make a insect collection for biology. A lot of his friends in town came out to our place because they "couldn't find" enough insects in town. LOL At our house, they could find the 30 or 40 or 50 insects they needed in a couple of hours!

I've noticed, too, that all his girlfriends have had an interest in the garden....even after they aren't his girlfriend any more. LOL They particularly seem to love all the flowers, but especially the variety of sunflowers in all sizes and colors.

I look forward to some day sharing the garden and all of its' wonders with another generation when I become a grandparent.

One thing that I think was a surprise to all of us, and not just our son, was what a great icebreaker the veggies and flowers turned out to be. Moving into a very rural location where you can't even see the nearest houses (well, 10 years later you can see 1 house, but only because they cleared a lot of land and removed all the trees), the flowers and trees gave everyone driving by an excuse to stop and visit. We "met" most of our new neighbors when they stopped to admire a flower or the veggie garden. (Because our best soil is in front of the house, between the house, which sits back about 300' from the road, and the road itself, that's where the veggie garden is, and it is a great "icebreaker".)

To this day, strangers driving by often stop to "visit" when I am out in the garden, and it doesn't matter if they are six years old, or 36, or 60 or 90 years old. So, I hope DS has seen how gardens bring people together too.

It is hard to pick out one particular memory that is more special or memorable than the others, but I do think one of my "proudest" gardening moments was when DH's best friend and long-time police partner passed away after a brief battle with a brain tumor. We went out to the yard later that day and cut flowers and put together separate bouquets for his mom, his sister, his wife, his son/daughter-in-law, and his other son & grandson. Each flower arrangement had flowers that were specifically memorable or important to the person for whom they were intended, and THAT was so important to us. The lesson I hope DS got from that was that gardening is one way we can express emotions when, sometimes, events happen for which words are not enough.

I hope DS's memories of gardening with me are as important to him as my memories are to me! If I had to sum up all those times we spent together in the yard and garden, I'd simply repeat that old saying "Ain't we got fun!"

Dawn

For much of our children's growing up years we lived in Mexico and had to rent houses with almost no place to grow anything. But then, I worked 11 or 12 miles away, at a Bible Institute which had plenty of space and allowed us to have a garden. All week, sometimes, I would work to prepare beds so that the kids could plant something on Saturday, or Sunday, when they came out to the school to ride their donkey or horse. In just 15 minutes they'd plant their "stuff" and go running off to the more interesting equine. I wondered if they were going to garden as adults.

Now, they are technically all adults. Our oldest worked for someone this year, who was new in gardening, and he really perked up, helping them. We learned, by listening to him, that he considers himself a gardener. I suspect, when he has opportunity, he'll have a garden. The daughters are even more inclined that way.

Yes, they really do learn A LOT about life through gardening, and through animal husbandry. This had really shaped our kids' lives greatly.

Here are to anecdotes for you:

1) I can still remember, when we lived out in the sticks, in Mexico (before the Bible Institute), helping my then 4 year old daughter grow carrots. But her carrots didn't seem to be growing. Then, one day we watched her when she went out to tend the carrot patch (in the back yard). She would PULL them up to check if they were growing and then push them back into the ground! The only reason they hadn't completely died was that we lived in a high cool rain forest and received 11' of rain per year.

2) One day, while living in NJ (more than 10 years later), our then teen aged family gathered around the table for a chicken dinner. We hadn't had any extra chickens to butcher, and the wife had purchased a broiler in the store. After grace, as we started to pass out the food, our youngest daughter scrutinized the chicken, and asked... "which one was it?" We all broke out laughing since our little family, having lived elsewhere for so long, really did feel like an island of "differentness" in NJ. We laughed because we realized that for miles around NO ONE else would have asked "which one was it!"

George

I must say that I have only recently started "gardening with children". I have a 3 year old granddaughter who lives with us and Oh my, does she love it! She has enjoyed it so much we bought her her own cherry tomato plant and have been growing it in a container. It has gotten so large and heavy with tomatoes we are continuously re-staking it.

When she wakes up every morning the first thing she wants to do is to "check her tomato plant". She waters it, fertilizes it and picks the ripe tomatoes. Of course since they are cherry tomatoes and she is only 3 she will consume a couple of them herself before we get them inside!

She also just has to help her "dada" (grandpa) with the tomato patch, the okra, squash and the cantalope. We let her "help" with the weeding, watering and harvesting of the plants. She has enjoyed it so much we bought her her own size gardening implements, including hoe, watering can, gloves, shovel, spade....you name it she had to have them all and USES and cleans them herself. I am so proud of her. She does more work in the vegetable and flower garden then her mom does!

Here is a link that might be useful: My little gardener!

GrannyJoJo,

Your little gardener is so precious! Of course she has her own kid-sized gardening implements! A girl MUST have all the right accessories! Our son had his own tools when he was small, including a little metal wheelbarrow for which I thought we paid an ungodly sum in the 1980s (I think it was about $25 LOL) but which is, to this day, still in use....now by the grandchild of some friends of ours.

Our son went through phases where he enjoyed some parts of the garden more than others....he really liked all the ornamental stuff when he was young, esp. when we started building water gardens with fish (!) and frogs (!!) when he was about 8 or 10 years old. He got into the veggies more seriously in his early teens (before girls and cars became a major interest). To this day, though, he does enjoy cooking with fresh veggies and herbs from the garden.

There were a couple of great gardening books when he was a kid, but there are many more now that are so much better. Several of Sharon Lovejoy's books are aimed at children. I remember there was one years ago about Sunflower Houses and another about Hollyhock dolls. Her more recent book, ROOTS, SHOOTS, BUCKETS AND BOOTS has a lot of the projects from her earlier, smaller books, including how to build sunflower houses, and pole teepees (to be covered with morning glories, moonflower vines, beans, mini-pumpkins, etc.), hollyhock dolls, a pizza garden (grown in a pizza shape, PLUS recipes for making the pizza after you harvest the herbs and veggies), and much, much more.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden also published a great book called GARDENING WITH CHILDREN. It is an all-region guide so its' projects can be done anywhere in the country. This book has lots of kids' gardening projects as well.

There are tons of books on gardening with children, and many schools use different gardening projects too.

It is wonderful to be able to share your love of gardening with your granddaughter, and I imagine y'all will have fun in the garden for years to come.

Dawn

I fondly remember following my dad around, in the gardens and helping where able. He helped me and my brothers to plant our own special kids garden with large zinnias and scarlet runner beans, which he called Jack and the Bean stalk beans. He made a point of telling us that story before we planted them.

When I was 4, my mom served me some watermelon, while I was playing in the sand box. Some days later a watermelon came up. Instead of pulling it, my folks encouraged me to care for it. It produced , just under the wire for frost, and that little watermelon tasted the best in the world to me!

Later, when I was five, I spotted an ornamental pepper plant , which my kindergarten teacher owned. I remember admiring it quite a bit and must have mentioned it to my folks. The day after parent teacher meetings, my dad pulled out a couple ripe pepper pods, which the teach had given him. We sat at the kitchen table and he taught me how to plant pepper seeds, which we then raised in our green house. It's little wonder that I grew up to love gardening! When adults are enthusiastic about something, and they help kids to do it too, they are bound to become enthusiasts as well.