Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

July 1, 2008
10 ways to get kids growing vegetables
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/real_food/article4250869.ece

Ask our expert: I’d like to encourage my kids to grow vegetables but they 
don’t seem interested? Sadie Bolet, Warminster

Beverley Glock writes: Home-grown vegetables not only taste fantastic, they 
are cheap to grow, and incredibly fresh - they can be on the plate in 
minutes. If your children like getting dirty and making mud pies - highly 
likely, especially if they're boys - then planting fruit and veg is a great 
way to get muddy without getting told off. It's also a useful way to 
encourage children to taste vegetables that they might otherwise turn up 
their noses at.

Here are ten tips to get you started:

1. Seeds can take ages to germinate and children (and adults) get fed up 
waiting, so start with cress or rocket – which grows really quickly, hence 
the name.

2. Buy baby vegetable plants for instant gratification and allow the children 
to get as dirty as they want planting them. Children come washable and 
there’s always the hosepipe to clean them up and water the plants at the same 
time.

3. Give the children their own pots, window boxes or dedicated space in a 
vegetable plot and encourage them to weed as they "play" in the mud.

4. Get the children to paint the pots with their name, a picture of what they 
are growing or just bright, colourful designs.

5. Older children can research seasonal fruit and veg and put together a 
planting and picking chart; younger children can help to draw and colour the 
fruit and veg on the chart and make it a family effort.

6. Watering the plants can be great fun, just don’t get cross when they end 
up drenched, if they enjoy it they’ll do it every evening and it will 
encourage them to check on how their plants are doing – just dry their 
clothes off overnight.

7. Give the children their own gardening equipment; trowel, spade and fork, 
they can paint these, too, to make them individual. Gloves are useful for 
children who don’t like getting their hands dirty.

8. Grow sunflowers or pumpkins and see who’s grows the biggest – make sure 
you attach a name label to them, or get the children to give their sunflowers 
or pumpkins a name and have a chart to record how much they’ve grown every 
week.

9. When the vegetables are ready to pick, let the children pick their own, 
wash them and prepare them and then do taste tests with shop-bought 
vegetables to see if they can taste the difference – this may help them try 
different vegetables, too.

10. Keep a butterfly chart to spot the different butterflies which the plants 
attract or keep a bumble bee or slug chart to count how many bees or slugs 
they spot each day. Expect a high slug count when it’s been raining.