Gardening with Kids – Lifetime Engagement
Reaching for the top of the sunflower, 1987. To this day, these are Mary Catherine's favorite - she even had a bouquet of them at her wedding.
Since leaving for college, I haven’t been home to visit my parents as much as I’d like. They still live in the same house on Staten Island that they’ve lived in for 28 years – an old Victorian with the biggest back yard on the block.
On a visit home this weekend, I was struck by how connected I was – and still am – to that back yard. It’s not just land to me, but it holds memories and lessons, and in many ways fundamentally shaped the person I’ve become.
I was flipping through some old photo albums and found one particular page that brought the memories flooding back. In her elementary school handwriting, with pink and green colored pencils, my sister wrote on a small sliver of paper, “Johnnie’s GREEN thumb does it again!” Next to the caption was a picture of me and my siblings cradling a watermelon that we had planted from seed.
To this day, I still remember watching and waiting for that watermelon to grow. We only harvested one that summer, and to be honest, it didn’t taste as good as the ones we got in the store. I suspect we picked it before it was ready, out of our eagerness.
Whether the watermelon was prize-winning or not, the fact that those memories are with me proves how influential gardening with children can be.
As I walked through the backyard, which has changed, eroded, and evolved over time, I was thankful for the gift that my mother had given me – a respect for nature, an appreciation for food, and a spiritual connection to the land that I can’t find in any church. Those things have led to a lifetime of engagement with gardening.
Me, my siblings, and our prized watermelon, in 1986.
I was moved to write about the topic after reading this post, entitled “Gardening with Kids,” from Sue Swift’s blog The Balcony Garden. In it, Swift recounts how a friend once chastised her for giving her son quick growing, hearty, and colorful plants such as Nasturtiums to grow, noting that children need to learn that things grown in “nature’s own time.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. In this day and age, when children are bombarded by technology and have no idea where their food comes from, discouraging anyone from gardening with their children seems silly.
Gardening with children teaches so many life lessons – from how to care for something else to how to care for yourself. There are a number of organizations dedicated to working directly with children. I’ll be chronicling some of these organizations on this blog in the coming months. In the meantime, check out one of my favorites – Alice Waters’ project, The Edible Schoolyard. It makes you question why every child in this country isn’t provided a similar program along with their math and history.
WOW JOHN! This was an early Mother’s Day present…it is heartwarming to read that all my efforts were successful. LUV-MOM
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Great garden! I think it is because you were in a garden as a kid -thanks to your parents- that you have the connection and still today the feel/will/need for it. My dad has a great garden too and I do feel connected and create a vege garden in each of my rented houses.
Now I am wondering if people who did not have the luck of a garden as child can feel it? And if they imagine the goodness of it, can they re-create it? And how can we help them make it ? All the grass-root knowledge? Lots of work ahead! Keep going. Cheers
[...] up in Staten Island, my family kept a kitchen garden, and this made a huge impression on me. At the same time, four years at a science and tech high [...]
[...] up in Staten Island, my family kept a kitchen garden, and this made a huge impression on me. At the same time, four years at a science and tech high [...]