Ways to teach your kids gardening

Growing your own garden is a great way to feed your family healthy, all natural foods. Unlike vegetables found in the grocery store, growing your own garden ensures that you are eating the freshest vegetables. If you have kids and you want to make gardening a family affair, here are some ways you can teach your children how to garden.

1. Start Easy
When teaching your children how to garden, you will want to begin by planting vegetables that are easy to grow. Some of the easier grown vegetables include tomatoes, lettuce, squash, peas, and beans. If you want to grow something easy that isn't a vegetable, why not grow sunflowers? Sunflowers are very easy to grow and the seeds can make a great, all natural snack for your kids.

2. Focus On Fun
If you really want your children to be enthusiastic about gardening, you need to make it fun. Generally, children will not want to do something if it feels like a chore, so it is important that you make gardening a fun and exciting experience.

3. Use Fun Tools
Most stores that sell gardening supplies also sell gardening supplies that specifically cater to children. From smaller sized watering cans in fun colors to tools that are safe for use by little hands, fun and colorful gardening supplies made for children will encourage your children to want to learn more about gardening.

4. Arts And CraftsIf you want to make your garden truly unique while encouraging your children to learn about gardening, have them make garden friendly crafts that can be displayed in your garden. Encourage your children to use their imaginations to think up fun and eye catching garden enhancing crafts.

5. Give Them Space
If you really want to encourage your child to enjoy learning about gardening, give your child his or her own special gardening space. Not only will this teach your child how to accomplish a task independently, but it will also allow your child to have full control over his or her gardening space.

6. Explain
When teaching your child to garden, explain why garden grown vegetables are better than store bought ones. Compare the tastes of vegetables bought in the store and vegetables grown in your garden. Once your child tastes how good garden grown vegetables can be, he or she will want to do more gardening, and eat more vegetables.

7. TeachAll vegetables start out as a seed and that is why it's important to teach your child how to plant seeds properly. Once your child sees how easy it is to plant the seeds, he or she will enjoy learning about gardening.

A garden enables you to enjoy fresh, all natural vegetables from your own backyard. If you want to make gardening fun so that your kids will truly love learning how to grow their own vegetables, the above listed methods will help develop a life long love of gardening for your children.

Guest post by:  Robert McElroy 
Robert McElroy writes about parenting, green living and more at www.healthinsurancequotes.org.

Snails and Slugs and Escargot

OK so why bother with this post on a Sunday night?  Maybe I should be writing some beautiful reflective article about rainbows, flowers and chocolate cake (though we did have that tonight - chocolate cake in a mug - decadent delight) but this is not it.  Tonight I want to talk about snails and slugs.  And yes it's not symbolic of anything incredibly spiritual or deep.  It's those slimy, slippery - always-eating-my-new-vegetable-seedlings-thing-a-machigs (did you ever use that word when you were at school?)

So while my family were doing the dishes after a delicious dinner of pork, mash and salad followed by choc cake in a mug (I mentioned that didn't I?) - I headed outside with a torch and my crocs.

I don't like crocs much (that would be plastic/rubber shoes for my foreign friends - not crocodiles - because in South Africa we do not have wild life in our back yard - at least not in Cape Town - unless you would consider my children wild life).  I have a pair of crocs - pink ones - which I use: not for fashion but for crushing those slimy snails and slugs underfoot.

I can just see you scrunching your face up and considering whether you want to continue reading this but let me explain.  I am no organic-green-recycle-everything-type of girl - in fact having to recycle just irritates me but I want vegetables and I want them to be without all poisons and pesticides that you find in the store, unless you pay a fortune for the organic ones which in our current economic climate is not affordable.

So we have slugs and snails and I need to get rid of them. 

I tried  a few less gross methods of getting rid of them:
*  making beer traps (my dad thought this was sacrilege to waste it on snails and I didn't want to explain every time my friends came around, that the beer in our house was for the snails and slugs - honestly, how many of you would have believed THAT?).
* I tried putting salt on the ground but then I worried that the ground might become to salty (I mean if you put too much salt on chips or popcorn, it spoils it, so surely it will do the same with soil?).  Not sure how scientific that is but it can't be good to keep putting salt on the soil.
* I put down egg shells which are supposed to cut their slimy bits and stop them from eating your plants - but it looked awful.  It looked like we were dumping our trash in our garden and the birds started to take wide detours around our house, no doubt fearing we were egg thieves.
*  Apparently if you put wet newspaper on the ground at night, the slugs and snails like this.  The next morning all you have to do is go outside, fetch the newspaper full of all these creatures and then dispose of them. There wasn't one slug or snail in all those layers when I tried it. Maybe its because I put out the Sunday Independent rather than the Sunday Slimes.
*  I read that if you attract certain birds to your garden, they'll eat the snails, which also didn't happen - besides the horror of them seeing all the broken egg shells in our gutter garden, our cat-want-to-be-tiger, does very little to encourage confidence in any bird, that our house is a place of safety.

Then I stumbled upon a site which said that slugs and snails like to come out at night or when it rains and so if you head out at night with a torch you will find these criminals.  Which I did.  There they were - guilty, guilty, guilty -eating all my precious plants.  And so the process started of eliminating them from my garden. I just pluck them off and crush them underfoot - it's something I will never get used to and I grit my teeth and bear it, just like I did when I knew that one of my babies had delivered a special parcel in their diaper, but you just do it.

Of course anyone driving past my house at night might suspect that there is a rather suspicious criminal loitering around our house, and I am surprised that no one has yet called the police - but maybe that's just the sort of behaviour they expect from us, across the street - you know those people with those children who do that weird thing called homeschooling.

Though mind you, it could be far worse - I could be recycling the snails and eating escargot for breakfast, lunch and supper - now that would be a interesting outcome.  Anyone keen for a snack?

Gardening this week? Looking for inspiration?

I love gardening, I never seem to have enough time in my day or week to do everything that I would like to and if I had an endless budget I would probably spend chunks of my hard earned cash on surrounding myself with the most glorious plants.

Gardens are a place of refuge, new growth, pruning - and as the gardener you get to choose the direction you want to take - creativity at its best.

I love the landscaping ideas found in any Garden and Home magazines, or photographs of gardens in exotic locations,  botanical gardens with their indigenous plants and of course garden furniture that creates a haven of solitude and beauty.

But then, here I am in a house with no garden so to speak and a budget that couldn't buy even one container advertised in any those lovely books we all like to page through.  So I am always on the hunt for unusual ideas for gardening.  Recycled, refurbished, budget ideas.  And here are some of my favourites.

Recycled soda bottles, mason jars and tins.  Anyone can do this!
 

Herbs in shoe holders

A birdhouse and feeder from an old teapot.

Recycling Kitchenware for the Garden

This is just the cutest idea, especially for when they outgrow their Wellingtons

Who would have thought a succulent and a stiletto could be such a good combination?

I think my children would love this idea

Happy Gardening!

What are we planting this spring? by Sam Adams

In the southern hemisphere, it is officially the beginning of spring. This is the time to be planting the vegetables that will feed you throughout summer and the early stages of autumn.

If you are planting seeds directly into the soil, it is important that no new compost has been added in the previous two weeks. New compost is too strong for seeds and young plants. If your garden is ready for planting, level the soil with a rake. Next, take a hand trowel and make a narrow trough about two or three fingers deep. I like my troughs to follow the edge of the vegetable bed, so they would be straight if the edge is straight and curved if the edge is curved. There is no right or wrong way to do this; you may want to be creative and design your own shapes.

Next, sprinkle your seeds into the channels you have made. Spacing will vary depending on the type of plant - try and think intuitively about the size of the plant that will grow, for example, a carrot is two fingers in diameter so with a finger on either side the spacing would be four fingers. Likewise, a tomato plant is large with lots of fruit, so plant tomatoes four or five fists apart (depending on the size of your clenched fist!).
After placing the seeds, cover with soil so that the garden is level again. Finally, you may want to put a label at the end of each row, specifying the plant and the date you planted.

Why not try seedlings?

With seedlings, you have the advantage that the plants are more mature, saving you time and the disappointment of seeds that either do not germinate or are eaten by a pest. Seedlings are a fantastic option, although they do cost more (a few Rand per plant rather than per packet of seeds).

For seedlings, remove each plant carefully from the packaging. Squeeze the bottom of the container rather than just pulling on the stem and then gently loosen the roots to encourage growth once planted. Dig a small hole for each plant such that when planted the soil surface of the seedling is the same as the soil surface in the bed. Once in position, back fill the hole and press down firmly around the base of the plant.

Planting every two weeks is a common approach, as it spreads both the workload and also the harvesting. This avoids having too much of the same crop at the same time! If you have trouble with birds eating your seeds, a good idea is to hang old CDs on string above the seed bed - the CDs flash in the sunlight and it repels any hungry birds!

One last tip - a great idea for carrot planting is to mix the tiny carrot seeds with radish seeds, which are much larger. This makes it easier to manage the spacing of carrots. Also, the radishes grow very fast and push the smaller carrots apart; when you harvest the radish after a month in the ground, the carrots have more space to fill until they are ready for harvesting.

Spring planting table

Western and Southern Cape: beans, beetroot, cabbage, carrot, eggplant, lettuce, peas, peppers, potatoes, radish, squash, swiss chard, sweetcorn, and tomato.
Inland: beans, beetroot, cabbage, carrot, eggplant, leeks, lettuce, peppers, potatoes, squash, sweetcorn, and swiss chard.
Coastal KZN: cabbage, peppers, radish, and sweetcorn.
Enjoy the planting!
 

Sam Adams is the owner and director of Living Green an organic food gardening company in Cape Town. With over ten years experience in alternative green solutions across a number of sectors, Sam has become a sought after asset in the green community of South Africa.

Having grown up in England, Zimbabwe, and Uganda, Sam has lived with a tension between the western 'developed' world and the rural and more 'natural' systems of Africa. He is passionate about seeing development take place in a way that is truly sustainable - for both people and the environment.

Sam holds a Masters degree in Sustainable Development from the University of Cape Town. He has over ten years experience in Project Management and has worked in diverse communities such as the wealthy mid-upper class to urban-township Cape Town. He speaks basic Afrikaans, isiXhosa, seSotho, Shona, Swahili, and some Chichewa and Bugandan.

Sustainable agriculture has been a passion of Sam's for many years, beginning in Zimbabwe and following him down to Cape Town via Lesotho. He is a qualified teacher of the AgriPlanner system from the South African Institute for Entrepreunership. More recently, Sam has worked on sandbag building projects, food gardens, rainwater harvesting, and recycling systems.

Sam and his wife Cindy run a sustainable farm near Noordhoek, complete with a permaculture food garden, chickens, ducks, and goats. Read more about the farm here.

Sam can be contacted on 021 785 4847 or info@startlivinggreen.co.za

Sam will be joining us soon on our Mother Matters discussion group soon.  We look forward to being able to ask him all those questions we need answered about our gardens.