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• Go With the Flow
• Landscapes for Entertaining
• Building a Better Gardening Future, One Child at a Time

Building a Better Gardening Future, One Child at a Time Gardening helps grow a healthy planet, and healthy kids, too. by Robin Haglund, CPH Children fill out the honor roll of my garden coaching practice. By and large, they learn more rapidly and with more enthusiasm and brightness than their older counterparts. And, they challenge me with the most interesting questions and observations.

Recently, I invited my friend Chaney to join me in transplanting vegetable starts in my greenhouse. Eagerly she accepted: "I love the way a greenhouse smells!" Chaney has been helping me in my garden since she was barely five years old. Her earliest years were spent rolling in the sprinklers, inserting bulbs in the fall soil, and later picking the spring blooms. In subsequent years she increased her helpfulness by picking up piles of weeds I pulled and depositing them in the compost. Early on, she understood that checking the berry patches in early June would ensure she was the first to enjoy the best (and the most) fruit. The next year, she began teaching her younger sister how to determine when berries are ripe enough to pick: "Don't pick the hard pink ones; it's a waste. The reddest ones taste best!"

Chaney has been educated through first-hand experience in the garden, and as I learned today from grade school teacher and school gardening promoter Zane Schwitters, this type of hands-on education often is the best way we gain knowledge. Zane explains, "There are basically three ways we teach: through reading, through pictures and through first-hand practice. The latter is often the most valuable."

I found Zane's ability to use gardening to connect the kids with gritty reality refreshing. Not only does Zane's gardening work with grade-schoolers teach them about plants, but he also gives them applied math and science challenges, crossing multiple disciplines with the very grounding concept of gardening. The children have the opportunity to look at the size of a given space and the size their plants will become. Using math skills, they space their plantings accordingly. Then, as their garden grows and attracts butterflies, Zane begins teaching the students about the life cycles of specific insects that visit their garden. Not only do the children get their hands dirty raising flowers and food, but they also study applied agriculture, botany, nutrition, biology, horticulture, math and much more through these practical lesson plans.

Back in the greenhouse, as Chaney helped pot up corn sprouts from sterile mix to rich potting soil, she dug out the first seedling, gasped and giggled: "Hey, there's a corn growing off of this plant's root." I stifled a giggle of my own as I taught her the plant was actually growing from the corn seed and not visa versa. We discussed that a plant grows from a germinating seed – a seed like the many hundred seeds we find on each cob of corn we eat. Grasping the concept quickly, Chaney segued our discussion to focus on forthcoming summer barbeques featuring fresh corn from her seedlings and watermelon from her seeds. On a cold spring day Chaney and I dreamed of the summer ahead when our families will come together over the picnic table to enjoy the fruits of our gardening labor. As teacher Zane reminded me, Chaney is learning critical skills that may be disappearing in our culture. In a world where children are not always blessed with a whole foods diet, teaching them to grow food and then share the food builds community; it builds good eating habits; it builds educated gardeners; and it builds a better planet – one tiny seed at a time.