Kids With Green Thumbs

By JOANNE BRIANA-GARTNER

When I told my 5-year-old I had signed him up for a gardening class, he asked me why I had. “I already know how to garden,” he informed me. He had accompanied me on trips to our plot at the community gardens, so in typical kid fashion he had “been there, done that.”

When I was a kid in school, there was one day when we all saved our milk cartons from lunch, planted a bean seed in it, learned the word cotyledon—and we all thought we knew how to garden, too.

Happily gardening is one of those wonderful activities that you can get better at with time and age, one that benefits from accumulated years of practice, can be multigenerational, and rewards the faithful with fragrant flowers and delicious things to eat.

These days many people live in places without enough acreage to have a full vegetable garden but opportunities still exist to teach children about where their food comes from.

Recently interest has been renewed in local foods, farmers’ markets, and knowing where our foods come from. These interests have been fueled by best -selling books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan along with recent Salmonella contaminations in a variety of foods. 

For many, this back-to-the-garden trend includes introducing children to where their food comes from—and it’s not the supermarket produce aisle.

Community gardens are a great place to garden with your children. There’s more going on there than could ever be in one’s own little backyard plot and they offer the benefit of working alongside older, more experienced gardeners. You can walk through and look at what other people are growing, getting ideas for future plantings. Plus, skeptical children will see that other people garden besides mommy or daddy.

The community gardens at the Falmouth Service Center offer another lesson. Because gardeners are asked to donate half their harvest to the center, kids learn about sharing what they have with others.

Aside from the one at the Falmouth Service Center, which has been filling up for a few years now, opportunities for the general public to garden in a community setting on the Upper Cape remain few. Some businesses have plots where their employees can garden. In some neighborhoods informal community gardening arrangements have sprung up. 

However, even families that lack large amounts of space can participate in gardening projects together. Tomatoes can be grown in pots or planters on a deck; try small varieties. Children like to pick and eat cherry and grape tomatoes. Small vegetables can be grown in window boxes, same as flowers. Pole beans can climb fences. Many herbs need little more than a sunny windowsill to flourish. 

Created five years ago, the Little Sprouts gardening program at Coonamessett Farm has become popular largely because of the efforts of teacher Lori Lieberman who covers such an extensive range of topics that even the most precocious 5-year-old will have to concede to not knowing everything. Classes meet once a week for 90 minutes. The summer program lasts for 10 weeks and there is a fall program that includes a parent/child class for younger children. Little Sprouts is for ages 4 to 10 with most participants between the ages of 4 and 6. “It’s magical to them,” said Ms. Lieberman, of the children’s response to the garden. 

Initially called the Magic Garden Club, Little Sprouts is a community partnership between the Cape Cod Children’s Museum and Coonamessett Farm. Because the program takes place at Coonamessett Farm in Hatchville the children can see up-close all the things that happen on a working farm. 

Children are increasingly disconnected from the natural world, said Ms. Lieberman; much of the Little Spouts program is just to expose the children to nature, she added. A connection to agriculture, and especially to its history on Cape Cod is something Ms. Lieberman hopes to instill in the children. Being on a real farm gives the children a sense of the cyclical nature of gardening. They are able to see every aspect of the process and go from bare earth to planting, harvesting, cutting back, and finally planting winter rye (for participants in the fall program) at the end of the season.

The Little Sprouts garden itself is a community effort. Different classes will plant different vegetables or flowers, and all the classes participate in watering and weeding. On the day I toured, the garden boasted corn, radishes, cherry tomatoes, marigolds, beans, broccoli, three different types of zucchini, and sunflowers that reached well over my head. Little Sprouts participants also jointly care for an herb garden. Occasionally people will ask Ms. Lieberman if it wouldn’t be better for the children to each have their own patch of earth to cultivate. Rather than maintaining their own gardens, which might become competitive, Ms. Lieberman prefers having the children learn to work together. “Let them take that lesson out into the world,” she said.

While some lessons remain central, others change each year. Composting, and beneficial insects are always covered, while caring for animals on the farm can take different forms. One year the children chose fertilized eggs from the henhouse, cared for them in the incubator until they hatched, and raised the chicks in one of the greenhouses until they were old enough to join the adult chickens. “We use the whole farm,” said Ms. Lieberman. 

Other lessons include discussions of companion planting, creating wind socks, fiber arts, studying pollinators and worms, and hatching butterflies. Activities include not only planting and caring for the garden but investigating the scientific and artistic side of gardening. “The garden is a place of both art and science,” said Ms. Lieberman. “All the senses are engaged.” The Little Sprouts garden is maintained using all organic methods. Bugs are removed by hand, and often identified with the aid of magnifying glasses. 

Ms. Lieberman said she loves to listen to what the children tell their parents about the day’s adventure at the end of class and “hearing what spoke to them.”

Ms. Lieberman, who is Waldorf-trained in early childhood education, says that she has a lesson plan for each week but it isn’t always followed. If something catches the interest of the children Ms. Lieberman allows for the flexibility to let the discussion follow a different path. “There are always teachable moments out there and most of the time the kids show them to me,” said Ms. Lieberman.

Favorite activities for the children include picking and watering, said Ms. Lieberman.

Each week the children take home a different vegetable that they’ve picked from the garden. Even pulling the vegetables varies depending on what’s being harvested. “It’s remarkable to see the children use their entire bodies to pull leeks out of the garden,” said Ms. Lieberman. 

Each Little Sprouts class is followed up a few days later with an e-mail from Ms. Lieberman outlining the past week’s activities. This is to reinforce what they’ve learned, said Ms. Lieberman who acknowledged that children don’t always talk about class just after it’s ended, rather, they let it process for a while.

Ms. Lieberman said she also sends out weekly reports for the benefit of the parents who may be learning about gardening along with their children. “There are a lot of families now gardening at home,” Ms. Lieberman acknowledged.

In addition to spearheading the Little Sprouts program Ms. Lieberman leads educational tours of the Coonamessett Farm. Between 5,000 and 6,000 children from elementary schools, preschools, camps, culinary schools, and other institutions tour the farm each year. 

While Little Sprouts is geared toward young children, older kids interested in gardening can receive instruction and mentoring through a gardening program run by the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension. Master Gardeners Donna Lawson and Mary Hunt co-chair the Children’s Garden Program at Long Pond Community Garden in Marstons Mills.

They work with the help of other Master Gardeners and community volunteers said Ms. Lawson, who added that the experience is rewarding for everyone involved. Past lessons have included a visit by Dave Simser, Barnstable County entomologist, who spoke about insects, and gardener Eleanor Kopp who gave a demonstration on floral arranging.

The program will enter its fifth year in May. “Last year, we mentored 14 children from May through September in a community garden setting,” said Ms. Lawson. Participants range in age from 8 to 12 years old.  The program is free and includes field trips to working farms, as well as to the Barnstable County Fair, where the kids enter flowers, vegetables and scarecrows in the youth exhibits. 

Ms. Lawson explained that each child designs their plot, chooses the plants they wish to grow and maintains that plot for the season.  “We also have additional gardens for our children to work together in a community plot, where we grow potatoes, pumpkins, squash, and lots of flowers,” said Ms. Lawson.

At the Waldorf School in Bourne gardening is part of the general curriculum.

The aim is to teach the students to care for the earth, said teacher Kim Allsup. One of the philosophies that guides the Waldorf School is the mantra “Head, Heart, and Hands.” Early on, it’s the doing, said Ms. Allsup, and by doing, caring for the earth becomes a habit.

Each Waldorf School has its own unique take on interpreting how to integrate gardening into the school curriculum. While in the younger grades the garden experience is hands-on, as the students get older the focus of the gardening lessons shift. For example in the fifth grade the focus is more scientific, said Ms. Allsup, “the students study botany.” 

By third grade the students are ready for an hour a week solely focused on gardening. Ms. Allsup meets weekly with the third-grade students. 

Several years ago she applied for a Massachusetts Agriculture in the Classroom grant and received money to purchase supplies, including compost and soil to create raised beds on the school property. Since the Waldorf School rents its building from the Town of Bourne they had to ask permission to build the beds. “The town was very supportive and even put in water for us” said Ms. Allsup.

The day I visited was overcast and drizzly, but the students were still excited about their gardening chores. 

“Do you think a carrot has already formed,” asked one of the students as the group bent over a raised garden bed containing tiny radish and carrots sprouts waiting to be thinned by 10 eager students. “Pull one up and find out,” said Ms. Allsup .

“Can you eat uncooked kale,?” queried one student. Given an affirmative answer, several eager hands reached, picking off small bits of leaves. “It’s so good,” one student enthused. Kale? Children eating kale? Most children couldn’t even identify kale in a supermarket and here were kids not only growing it but enthusiastic about tasting it.

The day I was there, this third-grade class of 10 students was especially excited because they were leaving the next day for a three-day overnight at The Farm School in Athol.

Some of the things they were looking forward to, according to the children, were milking cows, cooking their own food and eating it, and feeding the animals.

Through gardening Ms. Allsup hopes that the students will become more conscious of the cycles of nature. “Hopefully they’ll take it out into their adult lives,” she said.

Anyone who has observed the care with which young children tend to a favorite baby doll or stuffed bear will see them watch over the tiny plants in their charge with the same nurturing spirit.

Ms. Allsup described one lesson in which the students were transplanting their plants and expressed wonder over the long roots the plants had grown. “They carried them so carefully,” said Ms. Allsup.

“Is every single thing in the world made out of dirt?” asked one student toward the end of class. To answer this Ms. Allsup quoted an experiment done by a scientist who took a measured amount of soil (500 pounds), grew a 30-lb plant in the soil, removed it, and then reweighed the soil. “How much do you think it weighed,” she asked.

“30 lbs less,” said several students.

“Good guess, but wrong,” said Mrs. Allsup who revealed that the soil weighed only two ounces less, meaning very little dirt was used to grow the plant. 

So what is “every single thing in the world” made of?

Sunshine and oxygen. 

Seems that’s the answer for both plants and children.