How to Garden WITH your kids: A Catholic Mom's guide to presence with kids series

Have you been wondering what screen-free activities to do with your children this summer?  How about gardening?
In today's episode we are diving in to a ton of ways to incorporate your kids into your gardening plans and have a blast doing it even if you are all complete beginners.

Let's do real life WITH our kids.  Want an age-by-age guide to practical life readiness? Grab it here.

Transcript

Hello friends, it is spring time now and Spring is coming in full force, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and even the nightcrawlers are out. So I wanted to talk today about how to garden with your kids. Now, why am I talking about this this week, I wanted to start a series on how to be present with your children. And in particular how to have like a low screen summer and spring as that's coming up. So I know a lot of you guys are, you know, looking at the school year ending and wondering what can we do with our time that's going to be really beautiful, really powerful, help us to raise our children well, and still not go crazy, right? So gardening is one of the things that's just such an easy and beautiful thing to do with your kids. And it's just, it's so rewarding for them. It's so rewarding for the family. And this is one of those things where there's just so many benefits to doing it, you spend time teaching your kids a practical skill. And they get the reward of actually helping you to do things like put food on the table, which is such a big confidence builder. Not to mention all of the other health benefits. Did you know that there are microbes in the soil that have been shown to help battle things like anxiety and depression. And of course, there's the basic benefits just of being outside as a family. And getting all that exercise the beautiful fresh food, you get control over how you grow if you want it to be organic, and the nutrient value of having food that fresh straight from your garden to your table just it's the best you can do. But gardening, if you've never done it before, or if you've only done it before having kids is something that could seem intimidating. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the way that I include my children in our gardening because I've been gardening for quite a few years now. And year after year been putting more and more homegrown food on our table. It's been absolutely a wonderful addition to our lives. And this last year, we grew all of our potatoes for the year, which was the first time that we had a completely homegrown category of food and the kids were really excited about that. So how do we do this with our kids, the first thing is to get them involved with the planning and preparation. And a couple things I do for this first, I like to get seed catalogs, whatever seed catalogs I can get my hands on. And I will get my crafty are kids cutting out pictures of the things they want to grow and making a poster board of it. And then my less crafty kids doing you know who are more research inclined, doing more things along that line looking up what kind of zone you need to grow it in, what kind of soil it likes, how much sun and we chat about it. And we start to come up with an idea together about the kinds of things we want to do and who wants to help be responsible for what kinds of things the second thing I like to do is I like to get my kids involved in building things or making things ahead of time for the garden. So when it comes to doing things like mixing up our seed starting mix, that's something that they really enjoy doing. You take a little bit of this a little bit of that you get it together in the right ratio, it's very messy kids love mess, they love hands on tactile sensory work, it's all round really fun. I also get them making seed tape and seed tape is where you basically pre space your seeds on a piece of long paper. We use toilet paper for this because it comes in a roll and you just cut some strips of toilet paper it can be about three feet long and about an inch and a half wide. And what you do is you read the instructions on your seed packet. And using a little mixture of flour and water. You glue the seeds at the right distance from each other onto this strip and fold it in half lengthwise so that you end up with a three foot long seed tape. And this is something you're just going to plant directly the paper is going to decompose and the seeds will be spaced just perfectly. And it ends up being a really fun craft to do with the kids in those early months of spring. When you're not ready to plant those yet. You can do this for things like carrots you can do for beets, all of those that you're just going to want to have in a nice orderly spacing. You can also get them doing crafts like making plant markers out of those really thick popsicle sticks, have them paint on pictures of vegetables or whatever else. And they just love that kind of thing and it gets them so involved. Then when it comes time for actual planting. There's two things First, we start seeds inside and we also start seeds outside. But the early seeds we do inside my kids love to help that we used toothpicks and poke a hole into our little soil pads. And they put the seeds in one at a time. This is excellent fine motor work for little hands. And outside, we work together to prepare the beds, we pull the weeds, we mix in any additives that we need to enrich our soil, the kids helped me shovel compost. So you can see after a while, they just start to get the idea. They know what time of year it is, it's time to go and get the pile of the additives. And it's time to mix it into the soil. So our cabbages are going to grow really well. And they learned so much from this process. You can also get them involved with helping them make your compost throughout the year, which you will then add in the early spring to your soil. And this is something that my even my littlest kids have always enjoyed doing is helping to take out the biodegradable bits from our meals. All the veggies that are leftover that are other animals aren't going to eat and add them into our compost pile and layer it with the other things that leaves, the grass clippings whatever else we have, it's just a way to involve them throughout the whole year in the garden prep, and teach a lot of science in the process. It's a great opportunity to talk about things like the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, all sorts of things via homeschooler, you can add all this in. So then during the growing season, there's all sorts of ways to involve them as well. One of the things that little kids really enjoy doing is pest control. I mean, you tell them to go and look for bugs with you. They love that Kids Love Bugs, bring a jar bring six jars, sort the bugs you find into jars and examine them. Kids also love harvesting vegetables. I on purpose love to plant the super rewarding ones, the things that are prolific like beans, and peas, because my kids absolutely adore going out. And picking each of these every day. Even my picky eater sometimes will eat things that they know that they have helped to grow. So one of my kids hardly likes to eat any vegetables at all. But if it's homegrown peas, she can't get enough of it. They're also super motivated to get up early and start working. Because they know that if they can beat the birds to the fresh strawberries of the day in the garden, they'll get to eat those Is there anything like it. Finally, you can involve your kids in the preservation of whatever you grow at the end. So this is things like snapping the ends off of the beans, helping to chop any fruit, get it ready for a canning. And one of the things that I've seen this has really instilled in my kids is a gratitude for the things that are in season. Because we tend to not eat things unless they are in season or unless we've preserved them just to try and make sure that our diet is as nutritious as possible. And that means they really savor it. When it comes round. We don't eat strawberries all year round, we eat strawberries during strawberry season and the kids love it and look forward to it. Now one last thing I want to tell you about is what I like to do for the basic maintenance of the garden throughout the the growing season. And a really fun thing we do is we do on the days that it's time to water, we pull out the sprinkler, and the kids put on their swimsuits. And while we're watering the garden, they're playing in the sprinkler and I've set up our garden it's on a hill so that the water basically winds its way down in a little stream through the garden. And we put the sprinkler at the top of the hill where the kids play and then the water works its way through the whole garden that way. But if they just enjoy it so much, and the garden gets watered and it becomes this thing we do in the high heat of summer. That just is a beautiful end to our day every day. So if you haven't ever considered growing a garden with your kids, it is so worth the endeavor. It doesn't have to be complicated. You're gonna have a whole bunch of trial and error but there's so much fun along the way. It's a great way to get your whole family outside and involved in doing something and learning a real skill together.