Kids and Gardening

Teaching kids about gardening at an early age will help them understand where their food comes from, and make them more comfortable digging in the dirt and growing plants. As I've been learning more about growing my own food, I've been involving my daughter in the process. She loves helping me plant and pick vegetables.

The only vegetables in my garden that are thriving in all this rain are my onions. I pick them early when they are scallions or "green onions." My daughter loves pulling them out of the soil. Last night, she asked me if she could pick a few and I told her that she could. A few minutes later, she came back, proudly showing me three perfectly picked green onions. This morning, when I went out to check on my garden, this is what I found in the two onion plots:

The onion plots were dug up, onions were laying everywhere. My first thought was that a wild nighttime visitor had been in my garden - then I remembered my daughter picking onions. When I asked her about it, she said that she just kept pulling up onions until she had some with the bulbs still attached. She had to dig holes in the soil to do that. She left the remaining massacred onions laying on the ground. Too funny!

The lesson is: always supervise kids in the garden - even when they are just picking onions!!

As you can see in the bottom half of the picture, my lettuce plants are not doing well. All of my tomato seedlings have died and my pepper plants stopped growing. I'll probably be buying all of my vegetable plants this year. And I was so excited about the heirloom seeds that I found...