LITTLE SPROUTS SPROUTING SPROUTS

By Steven Biggs

Edible Toronto Magazine

 

Summer 2008

 

SHE SAT QUIETLY, OBLIVIOUS TO THE CRIES OF A BLUE JAY perched overhead, the honking of a nearby car and, especially, to me. Emma, my then two-year-old daughter, was surprisingly still for a very long time. She wasn’t sick: she was excitedly, delightedly and intently picking peas. Focusing entirely on the pod in her hand, her little fingers found and eagerly pulled – unzipped – the pointed tip. Once opened, she reached for the choice morsels inside and placed them, one at a time, into her mouth, exclaiming “yummy” over and over again. With the empty pod proudly deposited into her picking basket, her arms started to flail as she excitedly anticipated the next one.
 

Gardening takes the exuberance of childhood and channels it towards good, healthy food. Think ahead to a teenager who has already enjoyed a dozen seasons of gardening and eating homegrown food; twelve years of forming good eating habits, along with so much more: the awareness of other creatures like worms and insects; creative time away from the television; the nurturing of living things; patience and optimism. That adds up to a lot of healthy habits from something as elemental as dirt and water.


Planning and Planting


Engage children of any age in the planning stage by making it fun. A two-year-old might enjoy a trip to the garden centre to shake some seed packets. Pea seeds make a different sound from pumpkin; spinach seeds make a more delicate sound. Many seed packets have colourful pictures, like the enticing yellow watermelon picture that sold Emma on our first seed purchase together.
 

Planning for older kids can include colourful seed catalogues. Be forewarned: they might not choose what you want. Yellow carrots, purple broccoli, pink tomatoes and yellow beets are front and centre in the garden of a friend who attributes his interest in gardening to his mother: She always allowed him to pick a few items from the seed catalogue, even if they weren’t what she had intended.
 

This can be a point of pride when the grandparents visit: Emma has a small plot of her own where she grows cherry tomatoes, which she snacks on at will. When planning your garden, consider a separate small patch for the kids, something that will allow them to be the creators and nurturers. It can be as simple as a planter or as distinctive as a plot encircled with onion sets, sunflower plants, or even a wall of sticks.
 

You’ve never missed the right time of year to start a garden. April, May, June, July, or even August are fine for seeding outdoors if you pick the appropriate crop. Consider indoor gardening, as well. Edible sprouts can be grown indoors year-round. Or get an early start on crops such as peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes by seeding them inside. As I write this in April, we have just finished planting tomato seeds indoors. For Emma’s toddler-sized hands the seeds were a bit small, but filling the pots with soil was very, very exciting.


Tending and Harvesting


“More wawa, please.” The request for more water in Emma’s pail now punctuates my watering time in the garden. I fill up the pail and she scurries off to pour the water into another vessel or to watch intently as it disappears into the soil. She’s back before I’ve reached the next row. And why not? Kids love water. The odd seedling washes away during her engineering experiments, but damage is minimal. Watering done, we crouch
down to soil level to scrutinize the planting, hopeful that we might espy the little green hooks of emerging plants poking through the soil. If we don’t, there are always some rocks or snail shells to fascinate us.
 

“Look, look, it came from the dirt!” exclaimed our young visitor over and over. He was astonished – and proud as a peacock – when he held up the bunch of carrots. Harvesting can be magical for kids. For root crops like carrots and beets, guide them to pull near the base of the leaves, not the tips (which might break off ).With strawberries and raspberries, lift up the leaves to look for hidden fruit. Twisting off what you’re picking will save a great many plants from being accidentally torn; these include cucumbers, tomatoes, beans and peas. Gently tear lettuce leaves from the plant without uprooting it.
 

A basket or picking container is a great way to carry the harvest proudly to the kitchen. It also makes a fine home for rocks, twigs, bugs and other odds-and-ends, things that can buy you, the parent or caregiver, a bit more time for gardening.


Kid-Friendly Crops are Fun and Easy


To a child’s eye, it could be a small lantern or a candy in a wrapper. The tan-coloured, multi-sided papery husk encloses a sweet yellow fruit. The ground cherry, also known as physalis or cape gooseberry, is a favourite in our household. It is delicious and, more importantly, it’s fun. Fun crops top my list. Peas are fun to grow, requiring nimble fingers to help coax the vine to grow through some mesh or sticks, and we know from Emma how much fun they are to open and eat. I haven’t grown potatoes in years, but this year we’ll have fun planting pieces of potato in the ground, and even more fun in the fall when we dig for treasure. And what kid wouldn’t want to eat a flower? The easy-to-grow nasturtium has edible leaves and flowers.
 

The radishes we recently planted germinated within a couple of days into beautiful little sets of leaves that looked like small butterflies. Radishes are very easy to grow. Along with fun, “easy” is the other key trait of a kid-friendly crop. Currant and raspberry bushes are a perfect fit – simple to grow, and low enough for kids of any age to pick. Onions
grown from sets (small onion bulbs) are one of the easiest crops to grow. They are big enough for a child to grasp and insert into the soil, and require little care.
 

The gardening cycle finally brings us into the kitchen. Broad beans need peeling, bringing endless amusement for Emma and providing me with grown-up time for cooking. Shelling beans, stemming currants and hulling strawberries are just a few ways to tie gardening to food preparation. Don’t forget that kids enjoy using the salad spinner for drying their homegrown lettuce. The tasks in the kitchen become a continuation of the activities in the garden.
 

What can you expect to achieve from gardening with kids? For me, it’s the precious time I spend with them and seeing their fascination and interest in things that I love to do. It’s watching them dash to the table holding beans, lettuce, mint and cucumbers, and having a picnic with vegetables they grew. It’s having to chase them from the raspberry patch. It’s knowing they already have a budding understanding of food production in their toddler years.

 

 

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