Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today's episode is an interview with Susan from Two Dots Garden about gardening with young children. There's a mix of some practical tips and some good mindset suggestions in here.
Susan spent many hours out in the garden in her childhood. Her dad grew vegetables at the top of the garden and as an adult she came back to it when she got an allotment with her dad just before she had her first child, Dot. She started taking her up to the allotment when she was tiny and then when the pandemic hit the allotment became an essential outdoor sanctuary. Susan started an Instagram feed about their adventures which grew a loyal audience with lots of gorgeous photos of their food growing, fun and play.
I spoke to her a couple of years ago when I was first planning to release the podcast and her daughter was only three at the time. So I asked her for some tips for all of us on keeping a toddler amused in the garden for so many hours and also what life skills she thinks can be learned in a garden. So here's the interview.
Joanne (01:16)
you take your daughter down to your allotment she's only three you've been taking her since she was a baby. And I know a lot of people might think I really like the idea of doing veg gardening either at an allotment or in their back garden. But worry about what to do when the child's finished doing their little job and there's still hours to go But you seem to have found lots of different ways to try and keep Dot amused at the allotment so what sort of hints, can you give us.
Susan (01:38)
So I'd kind of break it down into maybe a few different categories. So the first one, the thing that I started doing quite early on was this idea of dens and structures and teepees, I was so into like den building and things like that when I was a child.
And so I thought, well, what better way? And as soon as I kind of set the structure up of a bamboo kind of teepee, she was in there immediately and it was, you know, hide and seek and all this that and the other. at one point I accidentally kind of turned one of the veg cages on its side and she just, she spent like, you know, a good 20, 30 minutes at the age of probably two, just sat in there kind of sorting kind of daisies or peas or whatever and just moving them from one pot to another. It's really not difficult to kind of build a teepee structure or, you you don't even have to do it with bamboo. don't have to buy anything could just use sticks and we've done that before as well. So that was one of things she absolutely loves the kind of... you know, the teepees, sunflower dens I've done. We've also just done a pea tunnel that she loves to kind of run through
So that's one. I'd say giving her real tasks to do. So Dot leads a lot of the growing. I can remember in one of the lockdowns, I'd sent a picture to my mum of Dot watering and my mum couldn't believe it at such an early age that Dot got her own watering can and was watering her plants herself and things like that and I didn't realize it was early for her to be doing it and you know that it was quite impressive almost but it was because it was okay here's a watering can there's the water you go and do that and she just did it. So the real tasks I set her to do is, sowing seeds, weeding, she will actually do some weeding, watering and harvesting, she absolutely loves to harvest, She has her own little garden as well in the allotment. So, and that's kind of her responsibility. So that takes up a lot of a lot of her time at the allotment. will she's really invested in it. She's got that responsibility and she knows she has and she loves having that responsibility. Another one would be kind of fake tasks, which sounds a bit mean, but I guess that's the same as, you know, when you do role playing with your kids or give them toys and stuff. It's just another way of doing that. I'll give tasks to do that maybe don't necessarily have an end point. And she can just stop the task when she's bored of it. So she's done all the washing up at the allotment before. She's washed the windows of my shed. She's got like a mini stepladder where she'll climb up and wash the windows. Yeah, so when my dad goes up, she'll bring him wood and there'll be like a never ending pile of wood or she'll come and collect wood chip with me. And it's those kind of processes where it's, you know, it's repetitive for her, but she genuinely loves doing it. And she'll say, I'm bored of that now, or I've finished that now, mummy what's next? And we'll go on to the next one. That, you can get a good five, 10 minutes out of each one of those if you're doing a bit of digging and things.
Joanne (05:00)
So you don't have to have like an all singing or dancing children's gardening project. It can just be like, here's a job to do. Get on with it for as long as it amuses you.
Susan (05:08)
Absolutely. That's probably, and funnily enough, they're the ones where she is interested for probably longest because I think it, I suppose it's age appropriateness as well, isn't it? And I think she's at that age or has been at that age last summer when she was kind of, you know, two and a half where she loved the repetition.
And you know what, someone asked me before about what Dot loves so much about the allotment and she loves helping. and she absolutely gets so much from, I've done a good job. Even, she'll pass my dad kind of screws and things like that or pick them all up and put them in a pot and...yeah, she just knows, I've helped, you know, so she loves it. So there will be an element where I have got actual toys, know, real toys. So we've got a mud kitchen, sand pit. She's got a little Wendy house. Again, all these things, not massively expensive. My dad made the mud kitchen out of a pallet.
The Wendy house a friend gave and it was absolutely dilapidated. I repainted it. They were going to send it to the tip. Sandpit, you know, I did pay for, but that is to be fair, that is one that she absolutely loves. Wildlife pond. when she was tiny, she spent, you know - it was just a it was a tub of water dug into the ground - hours, you know, is there any fish? Is there any frogs? And we then looked up what the little bugs were called that were that she could see in there. Yeah, that, you know, she absolutely loved doing that. She said, can we go to the plot, see if there's any frogs? You know, that was a daily, daily thing getting up there.
I also made her a fairy garden, which she absolutely loved. Again, I just bought some polymer clay, really cheaply. I think it was a fiver. you can obviously buy them You don't have to make them. But that was part of the fun as well. We made, you know, little fairy garden items and the joy she got from that fairy garden. Yeah. Loads of time spent loving it, talking about it for days.
And the other thing I'd say is, sometimes I put a lot of effort into make things fun. know, sometimes we do have garden activities, gardening projects, but then sometimes I just really don't and I just leave her to it and she just gets on with it and she goes up and she might ask for assistance at times. mummy can you help me take the lid off my sand pit, mummy can I do this with the peas. But all in all, she just kind of like me just gets on with it and she might ask for a task or an activity, most of the time she's digging up a garden and whatever else she wants to do.
Joanne (07:57)
I know I speak to a lot of. Parents and childcare actually who either garden or cook with children and they get very stressed about it because. Actually, they want everything to go really well, they want them to learn specific skills and they've got a project in mind and quite often that's a bit off putting because they've got to get everything all lined up before they start.
How would you go about helping a parent who wants to do gardening with their children, but they're really worried about things not going well and not being able to set things up in a way that's a success for their children?
Susan (08:24)
So for me, part of gardening as a whole, for me as a person and my stresses of the world and not just about parenting has been to learn to let go and not everything is going to always go right. You might put all the effort into growing that sunflower den and then it just doesn't work.
And sometimes we go up there and it's not her day and it's not my day and we come home and that's okay. Sometimes we go up there and she's literally like, mommy, I don't wanna leave. I just wanna stay here all day.
And then part of that process of how I think she's learned to love growing and the allotment is my ability to kind of let go. You know, I have a rule at the allotment. She doesn't ever get told off for putting something in the wrong place or over watering something or, you know, digging up what she thought was a weed and it's actually one of my favourite plants.
That's not what I want the allotment to be for her. I want it to be safe for her to, learn and things like that. So some structured activities, fine. but on the other side of that, allowing that kind of almost kind of free flow play and that, child led way. At times I've literally, you know, found onions that she's buried in her sandpit. I'm like, okay. Okay. Didn't know that was gonna happen. Or, you know, she's absolutely drowned some of the plants and it's kind of like, I might be able to get them back, but I also might not. So it's been a lesson for me in letting go in terms of my own stresses in the world and all the rest of it. But also that parenting element, know, we want to feel in control of an activity and it's just kind of having a laugh about it and going yeah it's fine, don't worry about it and that seems to foster her love of it and feeling that she's got a say.
Joanne (10:32)
That's good. And I also think, the things going wrong is in itself a plus point, because we have an education system where everything is measured against specific outcomes. And so if something doesn't go well in a curriculum where there is a right and a wrong answer, a lot of children can find that very difficult. Whereas when plants don't grow or they grow and then they fail or the sun has them, or an animal eats them. Yes, it's disappointing, but there's another chance. you know, next year there'll be something else. And the more you garden, the more you know that some years you can do literally exactly the same growing every year, year in, year out, same number of seeds, same day of the year. Some years you'll get loads of one and nothing of another. And the next year it'll be the other way around. And I think there's something quite nice for children about the fact that like, we only have so much control over nature.
Susan (11:19)
Absolutely, absolutely. that, they learn that their best effort is good enough, that's something I really want to instil in Dot, that whole classic thing of like the trying is just as important. And we'll talk sometimes about, well, those sunflowers didn't grow because maybe we didn't water them enough or maybe we overwatered them or maybe just not it was a bad year for growing but that's fine that's okay and we can try again and look at all the other produce that we've got and look what did work so yeah absolutely I think it's a lesson in itself.
Joanne (11:54)
Yeah. And as you say, there'll also be, there's always compensations when one crop doesn't work. Another crop somehow is glorious that year. And that's really life, isn't it? Things, things don't go right in one place, but they'll go brilliantly in some other place in your life.
Susan (12:08)
Absolutely. for me, The learning happens from the experiences. And that's what I want her to take home from it.
Joanne Roach (12:20)
I personally really find that approach of Susan's quite inspirational because I'm definitely in the category of being someone who wants to predict and rehearse everything beforehand to make sure I've thought of everything and to make sure everybody has the best outcome.
Now that obviously is quite helpful when I'm doing activities with groups of children but as a parent with my own children it was something I definitely had to work on.
Because as we know in parenting and in life, we can't control everything. And actually, if we did manage to control everything, our children would never learn to cope with what happens when things deviate from the plan.
So I do agree with Susan that the garden is a brilliant place to teach that resilience, that humility in the face of nature and the ability to see that a failure is usually not a catastrophe.
Two Dots Garden is on Instagram and there's a lovely long back feed of posts to inspire you so I hope you will check that out. I'll put the link in the show notes.
I will see you next time when it's a solo episode where I'll be going through the reasons why it's probably not your fault if your child is a fussy eater or having a fussy stage, but why you can still do something to help. So I hope to see you then, and in the meantime, happy eating!
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