Children in the garden

Today I had a lovely hour and a half in the garden while on parent helper roster at my daughter's Playschool, which is like preschool for 3 year olds - sessions are for a couple of hours twice a week, run by a not for profit organisation.

Earlier this year my husband and I helped plan and put together 6 garden beds, each 1 meter by 3 meters. With the teacher, we planned the beds to be 4 rotational beds, with a herb bed and a strawberry patch. So a few times a term I have been going in and helping the teacher and students planting out plants, seedlings or seeds (either direct sowing or into paper pots and then raised in my green house). Although we only had a few things in mind to do today, we just got caught up in it all, which I love!

Last term we sowed seeds for broad beans and sugar snap peas into paper pots with children from both groups. These have grown into healthy and strong seedlings which are due for planting out. We chose to plant out the broad beans today and the peas will go in later in the week by the other group of children.

We explored how the thick white roots were poking though the faded rolls of newsprint and dug holes to carefully plant the beginnings of our productive beans.

With dirty hands and thoughts of food, we poked around at what we had growing and were delighted to see that there were some things ready to eat. The sweet taste of fresh broccoli was tempting and eagerly eaten fresh and raw. We were on a roll... plump cherry sized radish were poking out of the soil. A somewhat less eaten vegetable by 3 year olds, would these school grown radish tempt the taste buds of the budding green thumbs?

Once the dirt was washed off and the bold red radish looking delicious to my adult eyes, I sliced wafer thin slices of radish. The pattern within the white of the radish is gorgeous, but not as beautiful to me as the pattern within zucchini, though much more appealing raw! Thankfully the radish were not spicy, rather a pleasantly mild flavour. The children gobbled them up! Fantastic!

I see three successes right there, with planting broad beans, eating broccoli and radish, but our gardening experience was not yet over. We also pulled up a bed of green manure, to be dug through to continue enriching the soil before we plant it out when the weather warms. Finally, the children sowed a tray of everlasting daisies, which will be planted out into the native garden when they are bigger.

Seeing these young children enjoying themselves and learning about gardening, food production and trying new things was really so good to see. I see it every day in my own young children and every week with the primary school aged children in my gardening club, too. It renews my faith in believing that through exposure and experience children will choose to make decisions that benefit themselves and their environment.

PJG