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Making your life greener - one bite at a time.

Whether it's a couple of pots of herbs on the balcony or a fully fledged permaculture garden strewn with no-dig vegetable patches, home gardening can help children grow a greener heart.

Capturing CO2.

All plants are very efficient carbon capture machines. As part of their growth cycle they use carbon dioxide and energy from the sun to grow, and if they’re in our veggie patch they convert this CO2 and energy into food for us.

Straight from soil to mouth, you don't need to drive down to the shops to buy food for dinner every day.

Worm Farms make great pets and those clever worms will convert your fruit and vegetable scraps into a valuable fertiliser and soil conditioner for your garden and keep food scraps out of landfill.

Children will happily participate in any project they can share with their parents. The key to keeping them interested is to have special garden projects that are theirs. It is always best to give them the projects in the garden that are faster and more interesting to a developing sense of self-awareness.

Provide Child Size Garden Tools, Gloves and a Gardening Hat Children love to imitate their adult models, and imitation is an important part of their play development. By providing children with appropriately-sized tools, not only can they help in the garden, but also they work in their own garden beds.

Their Own Space One of the hardest parts about gardening with children is letting go of your perfect rows or plant spacing. By establishing a garden bed just for your child, you allow them their own space to experiment in, while you work on more delicate garden tasks. In addition, your child's garden bed will provide them with a sense of autonomy in the garden.

Plant a Strawberry Patch  Not only does the organic strawberry patch provide delicious fruit, but it also entertains Eco Kids for countless hours as they hunt for strawberries. Children as young as two are quite capable of picking and eating their own strawberries in the garden. Plant everbearing varieties to have strawberries all summer long.

A Sand Box is ideal for garden entertainment. Reuse an old truck tire, makes a perfect recycled sandpit or make your own.  A hanging art easel can be clipped to the garden fence or make a blackboard ( nail a timber sheet to the fence and paint with blackboard paint) to allow your budding artist another activity while you garden.

Mud is a Free and Fun Toy Turn on a hose or sprinkler in a unplanted portion of the garden and let your children frolic in the mud. This is a great option when you already have a bath planned for your children.

Rhythm  Make Gardening Part of Your Daily Routine, young children thrive on routines. By making gardening part of your daily routine, not only will your garden be beautiful and bountiful, but your children will look forward to this time of day. Soon your children will start to select their own tasks in the garden from their familiarity with this daily chore.

From a Seed If you start your plants in a greenhouse, be sure to include your child in this process. Young children love to fill up pots with planting soil and are quite capable of handling large seeds, such as squashes and melons. If you purchase plants and seeds, take your child with you to the plant nursery or market and let them select some of the organic seedlings and organic seed packets (including plants for their own garden bed). Reuse pumpkin seeds and plant in containers or the garden.By being involved from planting to harvesting, young children will fully reap the benefits of organic gardening!

What to Grow  One of  the favorite vegetable garden plants to share with Eco Kids is a radish. These plants go from seed to table in less than one month. Lettuce is also a fast growing plant that will keep them interested. It is important for them to experience plant growth in a time they understand. These plants grow very fast and each time your child sees them they will be different in ways that are not too subtle. It is also a good idea to share their insights when they attempt to explain their increasing understanding of how they feel this whole plant growth thing works. Listen to them, you may learn something. To quote Mr. Art Linkletter "Kids say the darndest things". No fancy psychological ploys are necessary, your children will naturally share with you what they perceive to be true about how the garden is doing. They may be right on!

Other plants that really interest children are ones that climb or vine. Pole beans and peas are very intriguing to kids because they grow very fast, have interesting flowers, and can be trained onto a number of structures that can actually provide your kids with "forts". Tipis are a favorite structure to train these plants onto. These tipis provide the plants with excellent support while they give your kids a very cool place to hide and play. It is a good idea to put a couple of these tipis around the garden to give them places to do the make believe stuff that makes childhood so great. Make a big one if you have room in the garden so you can get inside one with them on occasion. Play a little hide and go seek with mom or dad to keep them interested in spending time in the garden. These times in the garden will be something they remember as family time and will seek out opportunities to have more of them.

Jack & Jill Went Up The Hill  Have a small pail of water in the organic vegetable garden. When certain plants are ready to harvest, rinse them right there in the garden and munch away. This is one thing that gardening really does well. It gets Eco Kids interested in eating their veggies. Don't go overboard here; let them come to you for the sharing. They may even bring you some to eat. Eat them eagerly but don't try to force them to eat any. If they see you munching away paying no attention to them, their natural curiosity will want to see what is so  tasty. Then you've got them hooked. This kind of bond cannot be shared in a garden where pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used because the produce from these gardens need to be washed, scrubbed, and have pesticide residues washed off of them with soap and water. Watch your kids, soon they will be eating snow peas right off  the plant, it's incredible.

Organic gardening with children helps establish healthy eating habits, as children are more prone to taste and enjoy foods they have grown themselves. In fact, in my opinion, the best natural toy for children is a garden.

Luther Burbank wrote....

"Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, and mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lillies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education."

The garden provides a unique environment for children to explore the natural world and combat nature deficit disorder. There are many tiny creatures to explore and the wonders of plant life never cease to amaze a child. Children also love to explore the garden with their friends.

Always wash hands well after gardening.

Happy gardening, growing and eating!

Growing flowers and seedlings http://ecobites.com/eco-kids-magazine/101-ecokids-1/796-growing-eco-kids