Three Secrets for Getting Your Kids—and Grandkids—Involved in Gardening

1. Do you value gardening and express the enjoyment you receive from getting your hands dirty? If you have fun, your children will have fun too. It’s contagious.
2. If children feel they are making decisions, they have something at stake and feel more involved. Let them pick some vegetables or flowers that will go into the garden. (Seed catalogs have great color pictures and can be invaluable in descriptions of varieties.) Let them decide where things will go in the garden; involve them in every step of the process.
3. Work alongside them—don’t make them feel they are doing your work. If they’re small, get them some kid-sized tools. Throw dirt clods, show them worms and insects in the soil, make the beds into funny designs. Laugh. Rinse. Repeat.

Choosing What to Grow

Flowers: Flowers can be a border or the whole garden. Use crayons to draw the garden map first. It’s wonderful to start plants from seed but transplants and the flowers they produce are the first things to mature. Since it is important to show results quickly, annuals are always a big hit.

Greens: Tell kids something is healthy and they may not want it. But, if you start them early, you can usually educate children before they become too picky. Sugar snap peas are like candy off the vine and usually the first thing to mature in the garden—a great first crop. Things with color other than green are usually good, too. Butterhead/Boston and Bibb lettuces come in lots of colors and are sweeter than normal lettuce. Yellow summer squash is quick to mature. If you pick the squash while still small (4–6 inches long) and cook it lightly, the flavor is excellent.

Tomatoes: Tomatoes are a necessity. Since most gardeners buy transplants or plants in pots, selection may be more limited than with seed packets. Avoid heirloom varieties, even though they taste better: The fruit usually are less attractive, the vines get very tall and unruly, and they are more susceptible to disease. Ask the garden center for a good disease-resistant variety. Cherry and grape tomatoes are great and taste like candy. Once they turn red, you’ll be harvesting all summer long. For something different, try a yellow tomato variety; they are usually lower in acid.

Sunflowers: Popcorn and sunflowers can be big hits with kids. They don’t take up a lot of space and can be fun to harvest. And almost any melon type will be a success—once they mature they encourage seed-spitting contests.

Pumpkins: A garden is not complete without a pumpkin. Choose a larger variety (but not a ‘giant’ pumpkin—they are technically squash and are usually too big and heavy to carve). Here’s how: Dig a hole about the size of a half-bushel and fill it with composted manure. Now plant two pumpkin seeds right into the compost. Pumpkins require lots of nutrients to grow strong, and the manure will give them just what they need. When the pumpkins are still green, scratch your names in the sides. When they mature, the names will be a white marking on an orange pumpkin. How cool is that?

Kids learn all kinds of things when they work and play in the garden: the power of patience, persistence, and responsibility; pride as tiny seeds and small plants become a bounty of vegetables and cut flowers; and that work outdoors can provide moments of unmatched wonder.

I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion.  The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed.  But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.

Weed ‘Em and Eat

In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:

“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”

Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.

And it’s a rare weed indeed that  has a book named after it:  Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

I tried dandelion wine for the first time at Moon on the Pond Farm, where farmer Dominic Palumbo had just steeped a pot of dandelion flowers and was adding orange and lemons to a huge crock.

Dominic Stirs Summer with a Spoon

Then he poured a glass from a bottle of dandelion wine that had been produced last summer.

The wine was light—Prosecco light— and captivating. I wanted more. I could imagine serving it to friends with fish. Or a summer salad with watermelon. Sipping it by a lazy stream as the sun disappears into a warm, steamy night. More.

It’s time to make my own. So I am heading out late Sunday morning to pick a bag of dandelion flowers and try my hand at bottling summer.

Further Reading and Recipes

Jack Keller: More Than 42 Dandelion Wine Recipes

With their small white bulb, ramps resemble green onions but the leaves are something else altogether—long, oval, and almost silky, with pointed ends. The little pistil or stem is either red or purple. All in all, one sexy plant. (Forgive me if I wax rhapsodic, but I’m a big, big fan.)

One of the last truly seasonal foods available in North America, wild ramps go by many names including wild leek, ramson, and ail de bois.

Found in forests from South Carolina to Canada, and as far west as Missouri and Minnesota, wild ramps are the first patch of edible green to appear after the snows retreat—and treasured by settler families desperate for any fresh food come winter’s end. Ramps represent a healthy dose of vitamins, a tonic for the blood, and some much needed flavor after a winter subsisting on root vegetables.

If You Can Stand the Excitement . . .

Do a quick search and you will find ramp festivals throughout West Virginia this month. The “Feast of the Ramson” is trumpeted with promotional language that verges on the breathless:

“The excitement is in the air … Just enjoying the West Virginia ramps in the springtime, for me, is what it is all about. Ramps which to this day thrive in the Appalachian Mountains and valleys … There’s nothing quite like Appalachian Ramps.”

According to Ideas in Food, wild ramps are often served at homes in the South fried up with potatoes or scrambled with eggs. In restaurants around the country “they may be pickled and served with fried oysters or soft shell crabs, blanched and sautéed in risottos and pastas, or simply seared and tucked up beside roasted morels and grilled lamb chops.”

If you’re lucky enough to find them in a forest near you their pungent flavor is yours for free. Otherwise you can expect to pay $7 to $20 per pound. Not that you need that much to impress your friends with your foraging expertise. In fact, as with eating a few buds of garlic, you might turn some heads of your own. One Charleston, West Virginia, reporter told of kids being sent home from school after having had ramps for dinner the night before.

Grab a handful while you can. Otherwise—unless your pickling skills are up to snuff—you’ll have to wait another year to take a ride on the wild ramp side.

More Reading

How to Find Wild Ramps

Ramps: A Sign of Spring

But I am wrong for a hundred reasons.

Inspired by local farmers, the staff of Herons Restaurant at Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront started a 2,100-square-foot garden and apiary more than 18 years ago. The impact is measured one bite—and one buck—at a time.

Chefs are responsible for planning, planting, weed control, pest control through the use of a spray using orange pekoe tea and biodegradable soap, and of course harvesting. Food doesn’t come by truck but by the sweat of your brow. When Fairmont chefs talk to local farmers, there is a more direct connection between grower and chef. Chefs have a greater appreciation for the effort that goes into bringing food to their prep tables.

Hotel guests sample produce picked moments ago, including 60 varieties of herbs, edible flowers, fruits, and vegetables. And they can stroll in the garden, running their fingers over the lavender or sampling a strawberry.

“Due to the focus of The Fairmont Waterfront’s herb garden—sustaining the restaurant with its needs throughout the seasons—it truly provides a connection for our team’s inspiration when creating seasonal dishes,” says Executive Chef Patrick Dore. “Our commitment to work with local producers who share the same philosophies in regional and sustainable practices allows our restaurant to offer a true taste of Vancouver.”

A half-acre garden will never replace even for a day the network of suppliers the hotel needs to feed its guests. But easy access and freshness provide another value: lower food costs. The apiary pollinates the garden but also produces honey worth over $5,000 a year.  Even a small 1/2 acre garden, like the one at the Fairmont Waterfront, can generate considerable savings on food inputs.

When you look down from a midtown Manhattan skyscraper you see acres of tar roofs. Do they all have to go green? Of course not—but just imagine if they did. What a wonderful, nutritious, world it would be.

Plenty of Opportunity (Photo: Matt Kraus)

Additional Reading

Hydroponic rooftop gardening in Boston

Then the organizers decided that they wanted to give finished paintings to each host or owner, to show their appreciation.

I can paint at any time, though I prefer the summer. What I get down on paper using photographs as a guide is the structure of the garden. What I provide in the end is a portrait, of house and garden.  It helps that I spent a year at the Monserrat College of Art.

Many farm wives must work full time off the farm, but I’m lucky to be able work at Whippoorwill Farm full time. The art is something extra that I enjoy tremendously.