Introduction to Gardening with Kids Transcript

This is the transcript to the Introduction to Gardening with Kids video.

Welcoming to the intro to gardening with kids! When my younger son’s preschool class asked him as part of Mother’s Day activity, “What do you like best about your mom?” he said, “Gardening with her.”

While this surprised me, it really shows how powerful and special gardening can be to kids. It shows the many things that gardening can do for kids and for you as a family.

I’m Shannon Brescher Shea. I’m the author of the upcoming book Growing Sustainable Together: Practical Resources for Kind, Engaged, Resilient Children coming from North Atlantic Books on June 16^th. You can pre-order it now! The link is in the description to the video or if you just search Growing Sustainable Together, it’ll come up on Amazon, Books a Million, Indie Bound or anywhere that you can buy books.

So why garden with your kids in the first place? I’m sure you are already interested in this if you’re watching this video, but there’s a lot of benefits that you may not have realized. As my opening story shows, gardening is a great way to be engaged with your family. It’s unstructured time together that you can just spend not really doing anything but being together outside and bonding. Kids can be involved all the way from helping with every single step of it, all the way to just playing in the dirt while you’re in the garden and still get a lot out of it.

And seeing you doing this kind of work, it’s a great way for children to be engaged in learning. So people especially see this in school gardens, where most of the studies have been done. One study showed that kids in a low-income school who had participated in a school garden were more confident in their science engineering technology and math skills than they had been otherwise. Especially because some of these kids may have been told that they were bad at those things and in the garden they got to prove that wasn’t true and they were engaged in ways that they wouldn’t been otherwise.

It’s also great – especially great – for kids who may struggle in more traditional academic situations. For children who are easily distracted, being outdoors helps children with ADHD specifically be more focused and engaged. And just in general, it’s a very calming environment. My older son is very intense. When he comes outside and especially in the garden, he just comes down. And it gives those kids who often would struggle in those more traditional settings, a sense of confidence and competency, both of which are really important for good mental and emotional health.

And then it’s good for your physical health – besides just getting outside and moving (and yes we’ve had more cars pass by in the last minute then I think there was in the ten minutes before this). Besides that, it also helps to eat their vegetables. There’s been a bunch of studies that show that kids are more willing to try and eat vegetables who have gardened than those who didn’t. Again, my older son loves cherry tomatoes. But he loves them much more when they come straight out of the garden and he’s picking them off the plant then when we buy them from the grocery store, where he usually just pokes at some of them. But in the garden, he pulls them all right off on his own, and eat them usually before washing them, much to my chagrin.

So where do you get started? Before you ever consider putting a single seed in the ground, the important thing is to have the right attitude. Gardening with kids is not going to be perfect. It’s not gonna be Martha Stewart. You’re not gonna have a pretty garden. Kids drop seeds, they put a whole bunch of seeds in at the same time. They’re probably gonna step on some of your plants or their plants. So going in and having an attitude of “this is a family learning situation” – it’s not just you teaching them can help a lot. It helps them become more confident. It helps them become more responsible. Feeling like they have the responsibility for an actual set of living things can help them learn what living things need. It can help them take responsibility for them. And the garden is a place of logical consequences. If you don’t water your garden, your plants, they will die. If you step on it, it will die. There’s a lot of possibilities for screwing up, but then learning from that screwing up.

So how do you start actually putting seeds in the ground? Well, first analyze your resources and your space. Make sure that you have a plan in mind that matches what you actually have and what you’re capable of. You may have an acre of land or you may have a windowsill and they’re both places that you can do some good gardening. An acre of land actually in some ways can be worse because you can get over-ambitious and try to do way too much and then not be able to take care of it. Whereas a windowsill, you can plant some herbs and still get a lot out of it. Kids can see how their plants are growing, they can plant them and use, you know, basil or thyme and cooking. So everything is possible, you just have to be aware of it.

Think about your climate. Is it, how sunny is it? How sunny is the space you’re going to grow in? There’s a lot of plants that need full Sun most of the time, so if your space is mostly shaded you’re gonna have to choose plants that match. That it doesn’t need a lot of water. Watering right now isn’t a concern because we’re all stuck in our houses or most of us are stuck in our houses. But if you do go on vacation, if you leave your house on the weekends, is it going to survive if you leave or is there somebody you can get to come, maybe a neighbor come water it for you? We have a couple of neighbor kids that over last summer we paid and they came to water the garden for the week. It was great. They loved it, they got money; we got our garden.

So once you figure out your resources and your time and where you’re gonna be, you can start picking what kinds of plants you want to plant. Pick ones that both are ones that your family eat and that are relatively easy to grow. You want to grow something that you think, “It’s a great idea” and then you find out after you have a whole bunch of it that nobody wants to eat it. Like for example, kale. Kale is very popular but I know I don’t like kale so I shouldn’t grow it. Ones that are useful are beans, peas because they grow, they don’t take up a lot of space. They grow very easily.

We’ve actually got some beans over here in our very messy garden. And I can, if anybody has any questions about what we’re doing here, it’s a little unique so I can explain that later. Not everybody has to do it this way. Melon and squash are good but they take up a lot of space, so make sure if you’re gonna plant those. You know you don’t want to grow pumpkins and have them take over every single other thing in your garden. Flowers are really fun to grow. Carrots, broccoli. A lot of these plants you can actually plant straight into the ground itself; you don’t need to buy them from a store, the seedlings from a store. You can just buy the seeds. There’s actually a lot of seed companies that offer seeds online and you can order them and they are shipping. Some of them have stopped but I think if you look around you can probably find some ones that you can plant straight into the ground, including beans, peas, carrots, broccoli, melons, all of those. There are a few that you do have to raise from seed inside or in packs because they’re very hard to sprout outside. They’re just very fussy. And that’s mainly tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. We’ve been starting ours inside. You don’t need anything fancy. Ours are old flower pots, and in fact Chris picked one set that were fancy. Usually we use old yogurt container, like these tomatoes. But they don’t do well if you start them outside. Unfortunately, these are the ones that people usually do buy as seedlings from the store.

What you really need if you’re gonna start your own seedlings is a really good source of light that’s also warm enough. So if you have a really bright sunny windowsill that gets light most of the day, that may be fine. If you have a patio or like a screened-in deck that’s warm enough, that might work. If you have a small greenhouse of course, that’s great. Or you can go with a grow light. Even though gardening companies will sell you grow light setups for like $300 you can actually just buy the light itself from Home Depot, which I bet they ship these days, for about 20 bucks. So if you want to go that route, you can do that. It’s not as hard as it seems but it is kind of like next level up from just planting straight into the soil.

In terms of planting straight in the soil, try to mix your dirt with some compost if you can. You can buy the compost from the store, you know get a bag because a lot of our soil is not great for vegetables. If you’re taking things from seed inside, you want to try to use seed starter, which is special It doesn’t have fungus in it that can harm your very delicate little seedlings. If you’re starting things from seed, you want to bring them outside before you plant them straight into the garden for a couple of days, for a couple hours, kind of introduced to the outdoors. Remember, they’re babies, to get them just a little used to it. So not basically go into shock.

The one thing you do want to be careful with in terms of planting outdoors and in fact planting your more delicate seedlings outdoors as well, once you move them, is to make sure that you don’t plant things that aren’t cold-resistant before your last frost date. So every place has a different last frost date. Ours and Washington DC’s here is this week. And it’s the date – the last date – that it’s likely to have below freezing temperatures and have frost. If you plant your tomatoes before then and you get a frost your tomatoes are all gonna die. If you plant melon before then, they’re probably not gonna sprout. So there’s certain plants you can plant before then: beans, broccoli, spinach, more cold resistant ones. And then there’s some that you shouldn’t. You just need to look at the directions on your seed packet. This is really what it comes down to. Or you can usually just find them on the internet. You can find your last frost date on the internet too if you just search last frost date and then your location it’ll come up. Or look on the Farmers Almanac.

So that’s pretty much all of that information to get you started. Just one more story of my kids their latest habit and hobby I guess in a way has been to sit next to the dirt box and take our mint plants – which we planted originally several years ago but now pretty much grow wild – and just pick off the leaves and eat them. But it just goes to show how enthusiastic kids can be once you start learning how engaged they can be and how surprising it could be, just like so much of parenting.

So does anybody have any questions?

Sandi asked a question: What’s a good way to get seeds now that we’re all stuck at home? Yes, several seed companies do offer shipping. We actually always order our seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange which grows seeds very specifically for the southeast region. They have ones that are more like mold resistant because we tend to get more mold and bugs. I think they had actually temporarily stopped shipping because I think they ran out of seeds, it was so popular. But I bet other stores still have them if you search. And plus places like Home Depot do ship. So I mean I’d rather you go to your local gardening store, but I know that’s not possible right now. So check out regional seed companies. Check out Seed Savers which is another one that carries a lot of the more heirloom seeds. And check out you know big big kind of hardware store plant type places like Home Depot online. But yeah there are definite places that ship. We usually get them shipped. I really like their seeds.

Are there questions? Oh yeah oh yeah okay. Oh wait a couple minutes see if anybody else has questions. Chris is looking to see if there’s questions. He’s having trouble seeing cause it’s really bright out here.

Should I buy seeds now if I can’t if I can’t buy plants? From Michigan. Yes yeah I would definitely buy seeds now because it’s still not too late to plant a lot of different kinds of seeds and only the most cold-weather seeds are gonna have a problem. Especially in Michigan. It’s still really cold in Michigan. So you’re gonna be fine buying seeds now and just waiting to plant them. In Washington DC here it got up to like 70 the other day and we only planted our seats in the yard like a couple weeks ago. And I said it’s gonna get down to 36 so I really wouldn’t have wanted to plant even the broccoli much earlier than we had. So you know, some of your colder weather plants that don’t like that really, really hot summer might not do as well if you plant them later, but there’s no harm in trying.

We got a request to to look at more of our garden. Oh okay, little little garden tour. I’m gonna explain what’s going on here. So we grow in a very specific way called layer mulching or sheet mulching or lasagna gardening. And what it is is, it’s designed to build up the soil. Our soil is very very thick clay. It’s not great for growing plants. And so what we do is we basically mimic what you have in a forest. So we put down, you can see our bits of cardboard here. We put down cardboard or newspaper, which block the weeds from coming in. And then we put layers of organic matter on top of it. And as that organic matter breaks down, it creates soil just as it would in a forest. So we got a lot of leaves. You can see behind us is we actually have our cemetery as one of our neighbors. When we help our neighbors by raking some of their leaves. We gather up tons and tons of leaves and get about two feet worth of leaves in the fall and then we cover it over with compost that we compost as well as compost we buy that’s locally made from stuff that’s basically yard waste our County composts and then they resell it to people. And so we do layers of that just like a little lasagna and then we top it all off with straw and mulch basically with straw. We get a big straw bale to decorate for Halloween and then we break it down and put it in the garden. So we did all of this in the fall and then we take small amounts of seed starting soil and then we kind of plant our seeds straight into that. It’s a really great way to build your soil. It’s not complicated. it’s pretty, it’s a lot of work in the fall. But it’s actually a lot less work because we actually get very few weeds as a result.

Those are our carrots carrot sprouting, which is exciting because my older son is convinced – he’s and we probably will get a bunny in the summer – and he’s very excited about the idea of feeding carrots to the bunny or the carrot tops, since they don’t actually eat the carrots themselves.

So that’s what we that’s how we do it honestly like it’s a great way to do it. It’s a little hard to do it at this point because there’s probably you’re not gonna have a lot of high organic matter unless you raise chickens. If you raise chickens, one of the best things people say is actually like the ruined chicken straw, the stuff that they poop in, is great for gardening. So if you raise chickens, it’s great on having lots of organic matter to put down. But if you use leaves or straw like we do it’ll be hard.

We’ve so far, we’ve started, got beans, carrots, and broccoli in. And then inside we’re starting tomatoes, peppers, and basil and then we also have some miracle is that my kids just plant it that they’re gonna plant it in their dirt box.

The question is it too late to start a lasagna garden? If you can get the right materials that would be the key thing. If you can find enough, you know organic matter, to put it in if you can find straw or there’s stuff like that you know you can totally do it now. We do it in the fall because that’s when it’s available and then all our garden prep is done. And then we just have to plant in the spring. And it’s a lot less like this it’s a lot less weeding. That’s one of the key things and it builds our soil so we actually add very little fertilizer. Usually we had a little tiny bit, usually it’s the beans because there’s usually not quite enough nitrogen to grow them. But it’s extremely minimal besides the compost we put down and just like a teensy tiny bit of fertilizer in the beginning of the year.

If you want to go kind of next level, we also do grow some fruit. That’s our pear tree back there. We have not got any pears yet. They usually come after three years so we’re hoping we’ll get them this year. We just put in some strawberries and we have some blueberry bushes, but those are the sorts of things that you do have to buy from a garden center. The place I bought the strawberries this year, Edible Landscaping, I think has currently paused any of their shipping or there’s a big I think I should actually that there’s a big delay they’re saying we may have a delay, depending because there’s been so much popularity. But Edible Landscaping is up where we also got our pear tree so it’s worth checking them out. I’ve had very good customer service from them.

Any other questions? Okay well thank you so much look for my book Growing Sustainable Together: Practical Resources for Raising Kind, Engaged, Resilient Children. And I’m actually looking forward to doing a couple more of these on different aspects of the chapters of my book. The first chapter is on gardening with kids and then there’s other chapters on sustainable transportation, materialism, anti-consumerism, environmental volunteering, and activism. And then the last chapter is on how to talk to your kids about difficult things like climate change which is very helpful these days as well because we’re all going through some difficult times right now.

So thanks so much I really appreciate it.