Watching their gardens grow

These are boom times for home gardening, but as many parents know, it still isn’t easy to get kids interested and involved. One way, experts say, is to teach children how to cook what they help harvest from the family garden.

Gardening packs an educational punch: It can teach nutrition, biology, mathematics (sizing up rows and plot perimeters), social studies, geography and languages. Vegetable gardens help save money, encourage exercise, deliver fresh flavors to the kitchen and reduce the risks of buying tainted food. Cooking is the logical second step, providing children with another life-long practical skill. With that in mind, the New York Botanical Garden offers gardening with related cooking programs for kids from 3 to 13, along with an assortment of practical and craft ideas for people of all ages.

Enlarge this image

AP Photo/New York Botanical Garden/Toby Adams

Children working in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden as part of the Children’s Gardening Program. Getting kids involved in the planting process is more important than achieving a perfect garden.

Enlarge this image

AP Photo/New York Botanical Garden/Toby Adams

Vegetable gardens can help a family save money, but they can also teach children life-long skills and give them a sense of accomplishment by seeing each plant through, from seed to plate.

More Garden stories

• Hummingbird, flower perfect pair 
• Eagle numbers up significantly 
• Group saves native plants 
• It's time to pinch mums 
• Watching their gardens grow 

• Back to Home & Garden page

“It’s a matter of taking things in steps,” said Toby Adams, the institution’s family garden manager. “Plants don’t grow overnight, so we can introduce things slowly. Getting kids to understand things like cleaning up the plots. Composting. Washing their hands before preparing salads.”

One thing children usually don’t have in abundance is a lengthy attention span. But there are ways to get around that. Here are some ideas from the authors of “The Family Kitchen Garden: How to Plant, Grow and Cook Together” by Karen Liebreich, Jutta Wagner and Annette Wendland (Timber Press, $24.95 paperback):

• Learn by doing. “It is boring watching other people gardening,” Liebreich said. “They must be involved from start to finish. Doing is interesting. Watching is dull.”
• Teach kids how to compare: “Does the beetroot ‘Chioggia’ taste different from beetroot ‘Bull’s Blood’? If you close your eyes, can you tell which is a white currant, which is a red currant? This not only makes it fun, but also cultivates a palate to distinguish tastes,” Liebreich said. “And, incidentally, shows the importance of opinion.”
• Stage competitions: “Whose bramble root is longer, whose bean grew taller, who speared more potatoes on their (pitch)fork when digging them up?”
• Experiment: “Did the bean with no water germinate? The bean in the dark? What happened to the bean with no stick to climb?”

• Do things in short sessions: Work on child-size jobs rather than large projects. Prepare one menu item at a time.

• Go heavy on the encouragement: Getting seeds into the ground the right way is more important than planting a perfectly straight row. Be positive and expressive when taste-testing.
• Emphasize safety: Whether cultivating or cooking, insist that equipment and utensils are handled properly. Ban horseplay when working in the garden or around the stove.
• See tasks through: “Eating the food you grow; this makes things interesting,” Liebreich said. “There’s no point in planting potatoes if you don’t, later on, get to dig them up. And then scrub them and cook them. It completes the story and also leads to great pride in achievement.”

Kids aren’t the only ones who will learn; home gardening has become something of a lost art for many parents, too, because of busy lifestyles and urbanization.

“Knowing that a carrot is muddy and grows underground sounds obvious to some, but is a revelation to others,” Liebreich said. “We have teachers visit our gardens who thought cucumbers grew underground, and mothers who couldn’t believe we would serve carrots that had been in mud only minutes before.”

Getting started

Here is a list of some of the simplest plants to grow, according to “The Family Kitchen Garden: How to Plant, Grow and Cook Together” by Karen Liebreich, Jutta Wagner and Annette Wendland (Timber Press, $24.95 paperback):

Easiest: Artichokes, French beans, beets, chard, zucchini, garlic, kale, kohlrabi, leaf lettuce, onions, parsnips, pumpkins and squashes, radishes and arugula. Cabbages, broccoli and brussels sprouts, on the other hand, are tricky to grow because they’re susceptible to disease.

Fastest from seed: Radishes (four to six weeks), leaf lettuces (six weeks), arugula (four to eight weeks), spinach (eight to 14 weeks), first early potatoes (10 weeks), pumpkins (10 to 14 weeks), carrots (10 to 16 weeks), zucchini (10 to 14 weeks), beets (11 weeks), head lettuce (12 weeks), cucumbers (12 to 14 weeks) and tomatoes (16 weeks). Asparagus is a perennial and takes about two years to get established.