: Backyard Week - Easy-to-Grow Plants
Backyard Week - Easy-to-Grow Plants

Wanna show and tell your kids a thing or two about gardening?

04.06.2009

Submitted by alara on Sun, 04/05/2009 - 11:00pm.
The Bite:
School kids on planting an easy-to-grow spring garden (just like Mrs. O.). Just grab some seeds, combine with dirt, water, and sun, and there you are: the building blocks for free veggies, chem-free flowers, and a colorful patch of ground.
The Benefits: 
  • Taking recess from TV. Gardening teaches kids to appreciate plants and helps develop a love of the outdoors, plus it's good exercise.
  • It's as easy as learning the ABCs. These simple, hardy plants grow quickly and easily, which helps to keep kids excited about growing their own food and flowers.
  • Keeping chems and waste outta the sandbox. A home garden means avoiding commercial-strength pesticides used to grow most flowers and veggies, plus the energy to process and the packaging/gas to transport them.
  • Saving milk money. An organic cucumber costs about $2 at the grocery store, compared to about $1.25 for 20 cucumber seeds, which yield up to 200 cucumbers.
Wanna Try: 
Produce
  • Organic Early Summer Squash - sprouts pretty flowers before the vegetable; needs full sun, and regular, deep watering; ready to harvest in about 50 days ($2).
  • Organic Pole Beans - climbing, fast-growing green beans; needs moderate watering; seedlings emerge within a week and are ready to harvest in about 60 days ($2).
  • Organic Mammouth Dill - great for container gardening, dill requires full sun and regular watering, but grows fast and attracts butterflies; ready to harvest in about 50 days ($2).

Flowers
  • Sunflower Seed Collection - five varieties of dramatic flowers that grow quickly: sprouts emerge in a few days, blooms reach maturity in 2-3 months; needs full sun, regular watering, but can survive drought ($10).
  • Magic Carpet Snapdragons - flowers that bloom more vigorously when picked; daily watering until plants are established, then every 2-3 days; sprouts emerge in 10-15 days; blooms mature in 3-4 months ($2).

Resources
  • Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots - author Sharon Lovejoy shares fresh ideas on gardening with your kids like planting a “pizza garden” or growing a canopy of flowers for a “secret playhouse” ($12).
  • Kidsgardening - National Gardening Association’s primer for parents on building a kid-friendly garden step by step; plus five projects if you only have an hour.

Timeout

Jan Lozito uses fast-growing green beans as a teaching tool in her home-based day care in Oakland, CA. Also in Oakland, Audrey Anne Orr, 3, hacks weeds in her own rose garden.

Bang For The Bite

If 10,000 Mama Biters and their kids grow 3 pounds of green beans in their own backyards instead of buying conventional ones, we’ll keep the weight of 40 steel wheelbarrows in pesticides out of the environment.

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cori  on April 06, 2009 at 08:30 AM 1
There is a great post on www.simplemom.net about gardening with kids that includes recycling toilet paper rolls for seed starters and a link to a project that recycles water bottles for irrigators. Gotta love the uber-green gardening! Cori
termiante6  on November 12, 2009 at 05:45 AM 2
Taking recess from TV. Gardening teaches kids to appreciate plants and helps develop a love of the outdoors, plus it's good exercise. games online

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