Three Summer Holiday Gardening Activities For Kids – Food For Kids Podcast episode 15

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies.

Today I'm going to be running through three fairly simple projects that you can do to grow food with children, even now in the middle of the summer. And even if you're not very good at gardening or you don't have much equipment or you haven't got much space, just simple kind of window sill or backstep projects that you can do with your children if they're really interested in growing.

For those of you that already grow your own food, you'll know that by the time we get to July, it's getting a little bit too hot for some of the quick grow seeds like salads, and it's a little bit late in the year to grow things that take a long time to grow before the winter. But there are quite a few things that can go from seed to something to eat in just a few weeks that are easy for children to get involved with and are a lot of fun.

So I'm going to give you three ideas and the only thing that you might need to buy is a little bit of compost. if you're just going to do this project and nothing else, I would go and buy a cheap grow because they have all the nutrients that are needed for a short season crop. They're only usually about three to four pounds each and they're a small amount so you could probably use it all up and you don't need to store any for next year.

So the first project I'm going to suggest to actually grow from seed right the way through is to grow pea shoots. So we're not going to grow whole pea plants here. We're just going to grow a little bit of a shoot, maybe about 15 centimetres tall and then take the top of it off. So if you've ever been to some of the fancy restaurants that do those really cool, interesting salads, they quite often put pea shoots on top. They're the ones that have two or three leaves and they have those beautiful curling tendrils which the pea plant uses to grow up its trellis. But if you try to buy those pea shoots in the shops, First of all, they're almost impossible to find. And secondly, they're phenomenally expensive. So this is a way to make your salads look a little bit shee-shee and also quite a lot of fun.

So for growing pea shoots, you don't even need to go to a garden center and buy pea seeds. You can actually just go to the supermarket and go into the aisle where there's lots of dried foods and find an old fashioned packet. They're usually in a box of dried peas. You know, in the section where they have like lentils and dried beans, if you can find a packet of dried peas, then those basically are the same as pea seeds. They are shriveled up dried pea seeds. So if you bring those back and then all you need is a small container with a few holes poked in the bottom. I do this project really often in schools with children because it's a nice one to take home. And when we do it with individual children, we use a foil takeaway container. the ones that have the little lid that you fold the edge of the foil around. We use those because then the children can take them home with the lid folded down.

But you could use a plastic takeaway container or an ice cream tub, anything like that. The punnets that tomatoes or something come in. It just needs to have a little bit of depth, maybe three or four centimetres for a little bit of soil and some holes in the bottom. So if there hasn't got any holes, then you'll have to poke some in.

And that's all you need. then a little bit of compost, like I've suggested, if you haven't already got some in, then a grow bag is probably your cheapest option. And they usually have those outside supermarkets. and then you just simply have a few centimetres of soil, put your pea seeds in really close together. because you're not going to grow a full plant. You're just growing a mat of tiny seedlings to harvest. So loads of seeds, and then a little bit of compost on top. If you want to, you can soak the seeds before you put them into the compost to give them a better chance of germinating, but honestly I've done it both ways and it doesn't make an awful lot of difference.

I've got a post on my website actually about doing this activity with children. It's got instructions for children and there's loads of pictures so you can see exactly how far apart to plant everything. It takes you through step by step. But this is a really nice one because you can just put it on a tray on the window ledge and then in only a few weeks, you'll have these fantastic little bright green seedlings with curling wispy tops and you can snip them off and you can either use them on top of your salads. You can put them into sandwiches to give yourself a bit of crunch like those expensive micro greens that you can buy or you can just eat them straight off the plant. A lot of children quite like them because they taste halfway between a frozen pea and a bit of lettuce. So they're quite interesting and it's quite fun to handle those wispy curly tendrils

So that's project number one, I'll put a link to the project on my website in the show notes.

My second suggestion, which also doesn't need any special equipment or knowledge, is to rescue some of those supermarket herbs that come in a pot that say that they're going to last forever and obviously only ever last about a week. They are actually not intended to last longer than about a week. They aren't really plants. What they are is a load of seedlings crammed in together. And in nature If that many seeds fell onto the ground and germinated next to each other, nature would kill off a lot of them because it's crammed in too tight.

So they've been grown really close together to give you loads and loads of leaf so that when you cut them for your chicken or your pasta or whatever it is you're using them for, you have loads and loads to snip off. But you will find that if you only snip a few and then try and grow the other ones that they usually keel over and die.

So what we need to do to make them last longer is to work out what they actually need. So this won't work with all herbs. Things like coriander and dill are very short-lived herbs. If you mess about with their roots, they tend to bolt, which is what happens when they go to seed. So they don't tend to cope very well. Basil can sometimes cope quite well with this, but I also find that a really nice thing to do with basil is to snip a length off, take off the lower leaves and put it into water and you might get new roots onto an individual shoot I will put a link in the show notes to some instructions for doing that But the best herbs for actually potting up straight into more soil are things like thyme and parsley and even chives.

I've gone and found an excellent blog post that goes through all the different steps and shows you what to do with really good pictures. So I will link to that in the show notes. But essentially what you're going to do is get your plant and then you're going to take off the top leaves and eat them, which is what you wanted them for in the first place. And then we're going to prune back to basically either just a couple of leaves at the bottom of the stem or you go back to just above a joint which looks a little bit like a knuckle on the stem and that's where the new leaf growth will come from. So you cut just above that and that will encourage growth. And the reason we want to cut that back is that if you're going to re-pot a plant and it's trying to cope with having been moved at the same time as also having to support a lot of growth, it often can't cope.

So what you're going to do is cut a load of it off and eat it, which is great, and then cut it quite a long way back down. The instructions are all in that article. And then we're going to put it into a bigger pot, because if you remember, I said that they were a bit overcrowded and didn't have enough room and nutrients, either put them into a bigger pot or you can also with your fingers pull them apart into smaller clumps and plant each of the clumps into a new pot. So then you will put them into a new pot with a little bit of compost, grow bag compost would be absolutely fine. Put them into their new pot then if it's quite warm like it is at the moment what you want to do is to stop those plants from losing moisture while they're getting used to being moved so if you can get something like a freezer bag or a food bag just to pop over the top to make sort of an impromptu greenhouse. All you're trying to do is to make sure that that plant doesn't lose all of its moisture out into the atmosphere and has to keep replenishing it. It just keeps that little bit of humidity around the leaves while it recovers from the shock. So again, I will link to that really excellent article in the show notes.

And that's a really fun project because you get to buy the herbs, use the top half of the herbs for whatever it is that you bought them from, And then try and rescue the bottom half to make new plants for the So that's quite a cool one to do especially with slightly older children, because they get to understand quite a lot of things about what plants need to grow and they have to practice their scissor skills quite carefully. So that's quite a fun project to do with slightly older children.

My third project does actually require buying something and the only thing it requires buying is some seed potatoes because the third project is Christmas potatoes. Christmas potatoes is the name that we give to potatoes that are planted in the middle of summer with the idea of them being ready to eat just in time for your Christmas dinner. So you might not actually eat them on your Christmas dinner, but it's around Christmas time. And so this is quite a fun one for children because they can plant them now at the beginning of the school holidays, but then they can harvest them in the Christmas holidays and whatever they get can end up on Christmas dinner or one of the meals with their family. So it's quite a little triumph.

The difference between growing Christmas potatoes versus the regular potatoes that we start off in the spring and then harvest in the summer and autumn is that the regular ones are being planted at the time when nature is starting to warm up. They get the benefit of the whole of the summer heat to grow and then they die off in the winter when frosts come. These potatoes obviously are going to get planted now. They're going to get some growth on them but then when it gets to the autumn, they wouldn't be grown enough when the frosts come. So what you are going to need to do, the only thing you're going to need for this is to be able to keep them somewhere inside. So this is a good project if you've got either an old greenhouse or a shed that's got a bench in it that's got a bit of light or a corner of a conservatory, or a corner of a utility or something where you could bring them in when it gets towards the frost in October, that you can bring them in and save those leaves from getting spoiled.

You do have to buy seed potatoes for these. They don't cost very much. You're talking only a few pounds. Because although you can, if you want to have a go using some of your own potatoes that have sprouted, a lot of the time the potatoes that come from the supermarket and then have just sprouted aren't quite as robust and because we're asking a plant to grow at a time of year when it's not used to it, it's probably better if you can get the seed potatoes that are the most suitable for this type of growing. And then basically you're gonna put them into a bag or a tub. If you are already a grower, you might have potato bags or you might have a really big container. If you aren't a grower, then you're looking at something slightly bigger than like a regular household bucket. A really easy thing to grow potatoes in is an old bag for life. You can just poke some holes in the bottom of it and then that will work really well. And when we're growing potatoes, basically we always put about half the container full of compost. Again, the grow bag will work fine.

Pop between one and three seed potatoes in, depending on the size of the container. If you do in a bag for life, you could probably fit two into there. You put those in and then you top it up with a bit of soil. And then as the plant comes up and you start to get leaves, you put a little bit more soil on so the leaves keep getting higher. That's a thing called earthing up. So I will link in the show notes to some explanations of how to grow potatoes and how to grow Christmas potatoes. I just think it's really quite a nice project because if you buy a grow bag of compost, use an old bag for life and poke some holes in it, you get a handful of cheap seed potatoes and you plant them at the beginning of the summer holidays. You can see how they grow. You just need to remember in October to bring them inside somewhere before the frosts And then it's a lot of fun in the Christmas holidays to tip the bag out and see what potatoes you've got for Christmas.

Okay, so that was my three ideas of things that you could do at this time of year with your children that still get them to do some growing, even if you haven't got much experience or much equipment.

I hope you will pick one out. Please let me know if you do.

On Monday's episode, I've got an interview with someone who was a nanny for quite a long time. So we had a really interesting conversation about how parents and childcare providers like nannies, childminders and other in-home providers can work together to make sure that everybody's on the same page when it comes to preparing the children's food.

So I hope you'll join me for that. And in the meantime, happy eating.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:17 Project 1: Growing Pea Shoots

04:20 Project 2: Rescuing Supermarket Herbs

07:48 Project 3: Christmas Potatoes