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Community Corner

Give Your Kids The Gardening Bug

A cheap container or small patch of earth is all you need for kids to get started and possibly foster a life-long love of gardening.

The flowers are blooming and we’ve just made it through the last predicted frost for our area so it’s time to turn our attention to the garden.

There’s no better way to get kids motivated to eat their veggies than by having them grow their own. A sliced tomato on a plate isn’t quite as exciting as biting into a warm, ripe one fresh off the vine with juice spilling down your arm. 

Most kids love the idea of growing things and are enthusiastic about gardening if you give them their own space and some choice in the matter. 

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Last year, I purchased three different colored drink tubs from the Christmas Tree Shop. We drilled holes in the bottom, filled them with quality soil and then took a trip to the store to purchase plants. Many people think they must spend top dollar on vegetable plants at high end nurseries as the quality must be better. Not so. Every year I buy all of my vegetable plants at , and Home Depot and every year I have a prolific and beautiful harvest of organic vegetables and flowers. Spending more doesn’t guarantee that you will have better plants. The real focus should be on what hardiness zone we are in (Framingham falls within Zone 6A), soil quality, sun and drainage. 

Vegetable gardening is relatively easy but involves some basic knowledge. For a few years I was getting very deformed cucumbers to the point that my husband feared we had some sort of toxic planting bed. What I didn’t realize was the importance of crop rotation. Each plant gleans certain nutrients from the soil. So if you plant the same plants in the same spot year after year (as I was doing) you get a poor quality vegetable (i.e. deformed) and you are subject to garden pests. Once I started crop rotation I was back in business.

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Keeping these things in mind, giving kids a tub or a small patch to grow in is a great bonding time for kids and parents but also teaches kids how edibles go from soil to table. 

In order to keep it fair, I brainstormed with my boys about what plants they wanted to grow. Of course they wanted lemons and giant watermelons; things that weren’t possible in a small tub or our hardiness zone.  We chose a few small plants that would grow well and complement each other. They each got a few magnolias for color and pest control and they were officially “farmers” with their own tub to tend.

Each day they checked their plants and watered faithfully. They were thrilled when the first fruits of their labor were starting to grow. This lead to plans for what meals we could make with what they had grown. They were more willing to eat basil and my Asian eggplant after having watched its growth. 

There are many resources on the web and in the library on vegetable gardening. Do a Google search and you will have more information than you can use.  Above all have fun!

 

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