By BJ Jarvis
Home vegetable gardening remains one of the nation’s favorite pastimes. Home, community and container gardens are popping up across Florida’s landscapes. Even the White House has a garden that kids like to toil in, growing cucumbers, beans and tomatoes.
With more than7 million households raising vegetables last year, the benefits are many. Whether for exercise, for the joy of raising something or the tremendous flavor of fresh off-the-vine taste, gardening is good for kids as well as adults.
Children like to garden and may discover vegetables they like that they haven’t loved at the dinner table. There is something about putting a seed or transplant in the ground, watering it, nurturing it and watching it grow that has a way of opening eyes to new tastes. The best thing is to make it fun and manageable.
Start with unique vegetables or unusual colors or plants with fun names, such as Easter egg eggplant, purple potatoes, white carrots, black tomatoes, multi-colored sweet corn and all sorts of miniature or giant vegetables too.
Go to a garden center seed shelf or pour over a seed catalog for unique plants to try. Make the choices simple to grow for quicker success, but be cautious. Radishes and spinach are easy to grow and sprout within two days, but do kids really want to eat them? Lettuce, squash, beans and onions are also reliable growers from seed. For some of the slow-to-sprout plants, you may want to choose transplants.
A themed garden can also make it fun. Consider a salsa garden with peppers, onions, tomatillos and cilantro. A pizza garden can include tomatoes, peppers and basil.
Making a manageable garden depends a bit on the age of the child. Suffice it to say that even older youth will benefit from starting small — even just a few in containers. Nothing is worse than filling the backyard with row upon row of veggies that sprout with the weeds to discourage a new interest in gardening.
Engage other senses by adding fragrant herbs to the mix. Dill, oregano, parsley and rosemary are all easy for beginners.
As the children tend their garden, they’ll learn that not all bugs are bad, what part of the plant is eaten and that weeds grow really fast. They’ll also enjoy the sunshine, get some exercise, appreciate nature and maybe along the way learn to appreciate all the hard work that goes into filling our grocer’s produce shelves.
When I worked at Brooklyn Botanical Garden, we had a large kid gardening with two youth pairing up in each small garden. As the summer progressed, we’d make a stir-fry lunch using whatever the kids wanted from their gardens. If they loved carrots, there were lots of carrots. Hate onions? No onions in your stir-fry. Add rice (or noodles) and you have a healthy, garden fresh meal. It assures everyone enjoys their harvest, uses whatever is ripe and was the highlight of the summer.
Consider starting a vegetable garden this spring with your children and rediscover the joys of gardening through a pair of fresh eyes. For more information, check out the University of Florida’s vegetable gardening publication at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/vh/vh02100.pdf.
-BJ Jarvis is the Horticulture Agent and Extension Director at Pasco Cooperative Extension. She can be reached at .
