Five things that can spoil planting projects with kids and how to fix them – Food For Kids Podcast episode 93

Joanne Roach (00:13)

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

Before we start today's episode, I have to make a confession that my microphone actually broke just before I started recording this episode. So I'm recording it on a smartphone microphone snd I do apologize if the sound isn't up to the normal standard. Hopefully it'll be back by the next episode.

Cracking on, spring has definitely sprung and many listeners will be growing food with kids this year, either with children at home or in an education setting. And if you sometimes find that sowing seeds can be a bit frustrating with children, this episode is for you. I'm going to run through five reasons that sowing seeds with kids can sometimes be a bit tricky and give some suggestions that will make your seed sowing with children easier and more successful and more fun for both you and the children. These tips are taken from a free guide that you can download at the end, so don't worry about taking notes, just think through the ideas as I talk them through and you can get that guide at the end to help with your planning. So let's get into those reasons and solutions.

Joanne Roach (01:17)

So as we go through these reasons, you might find that some of them don't sound relevant to sowing seeds, but bear with me because I'll explain how they can affect it.

Number one is that children can be competitive, even if that isn't loud or obvious. Children like to feel that they're good at something and often good to young children means fast or first. This can sometimes manifest itself in children rushing ahead to the next step to try to get there first. This is lovely because they're keen, but they can often be so focused on getting

ahead to the next step that they don't listen carefully to the instructions or they do tasks out of order. So an example with seeds would be if they're so keen to plant their seed that they push the seed into the compost a long way before you tell them that it should be planted really shallow. The result of this is that either they might lose their seed and they can't find it to plant properly or the seed will be planted too deep and will not be able to get to the surface before it exhausts itself and then they'll be disappointed because it won't sprout. Or they can plant seeds into dry compost before finding out it's better to water at first because they might get washed away when you water afterwards.

So you can see that their desire to get to the next step and be the first one to complete it can often mean that they don't listen very well. So here's how you can plan for this. Give instructions one at a time. For some very young children, it's easier to take in one task at a time so they can focus on that and not be racing ahead to the next one. Also, giving an overview at the beginning of the most important things. Older children can often guess the tasks ahead, so staggering the instructions for them won't work. But if you go over the whole process before you start and give them their seeds and you highlight the most important points of success, such as the seed being planted shallow in that example, then the children who can't help themselves but rush ahead will at least have a better chance of not spoiling their success.

Another way to slow children down until they've heard everything is to not give out the tools before the instructions are complete. if children have pots, soil and seeds in front of them or in their hands, their brains will often be so engaged with the objects that they're looking at, they'll find it much harder to listen. If a child doesn't have a seed in their hand, they can't plant it prematurely. So break the task down into stages and go through the instructions for each stage before giving them the tools for that stage. It doesn't mean you can't look at objects until they're needed. For example, you can demonstrate and they can look and listen at the same time, but they haven't engaged their hands and wanting to get So that's reason number one.

Reason number two is a little bit more obvious, which is that young children's basic motor skills still need practice and for lots of them seeds are quite fiddly. One of the brilliant things about gardening is it helps them master their motor skills, both their large ones for things like digging or hoeing or raking and their fine ones for things like planting and weeding or pricking out seedlings. But as adult gardeners it's really easy to forget that these skills are still developing in children and you might get frustrated if they can't copy you exactly.

This can cause unintentional problems with small seeds so young children might find it very hard to sow seed finely and to space their sowings out well. even when they try very hard, they can often end up with seeds being in lumps and clumps with big spaces in between. So the way that you can plan with this is to give them the seeds a little bit at a time. If a child's going to sow several or a row of seeds, so for example, a row of carrot seeds, just give them a few seeds for that first few centimetres and then get them to come back to get some more for the next few centimetres. Don't dole out all the seeds in one go unless you want them to be sown in a clump.

In the longer term, teaching them to pinch effectively will help them with those skills. Although as adult gardeners we use a range of different ways to sow seeds, including pinching but also including shaking them from a palm or a packet, it's much easier for children to use small amounts by pinching and sprinkling. So place seeds on a saucer or dish and encourage the children to take pinches of seeds out at a time. This makes the experience last a bit longer, it builds their control, it means the seeds get rationed out effectively.

If you want to practice this skill away from gardening you can practice it with things like sprinkling glitter sprinkling fish food, putting sprinkles onto cakes. A very tailored practice would be a line of PVA glue onto paper and getting them to sprinkle glitter onto that line of PVA glue and try to make the sprinkle last all the way along the line of glue.

Reason number three why sometimes seed sowing can go awry is that children can find estimating quite hard. They'll get better at estimating over time, but in the meantime, they can use measuring instead. Gardeners get used to estimating planting distances and depths and spacing by eye, but most of us still measure the first few times that we plant something and young children are still learning how to estimate at all and how to measure quantities and sizes.

Something like a bean seed that you plant a little bit deep will generally still make it to the surface, but a tiny little carrot seed might not. Seeds have to contain all the energy they need to reach the surface and the sunlight and they can only sprout so far without exhausting themselves. So planting depth really does matter and they can be really disappointed if they plant their seeds at the wrong depth and they don't sprout. When it comes to spacing seed, if plants are too close together, they'll have to be thinned and the children will be upset at their plants being discarded.

You can help and plan for this by using different units of measurement. If children are too young to know what five centimetres means, they might still be able to poke a hole as deep as their middle finger. Or if they can't estimate spacing between plants of 10 centimetres, they can plant a crayon length apart.

Reason number four that nature isn't always fair and most children have a very me-centred view of fairness. Nature is set up to be unfair to individuals, but fair to a whole ecosystem. So in a garden, some plants will die for the benefit of other plants or organisms, or they'll die because of pest or disease or neglect, but something else thrives instead. This is really important to the survival of the natural world, but when your project is the one that's being lost to the survival of the fittest, it can seem very unfair, especially if you're little.

So for example, very few packs of seeds will have a hundred percent germination rate. And of those that do, some of those will be weaker plants which won't thrive even when they are treated like the other plants. Or when you've got your seeds to sprout and you've got your bunch of either through accident or through accidental lack of care, some of the plants will be killed off. So, for example, in a classroom with 30 plants, you might lose 10. Maybe because one afternoon is very hot and you're out doing sport and you don't notice. a long bank holiday weekend and a few of them get too dry. Nature on the whole doesn't mind these losses because overall enough plants survive and they're the best quality and the strongest to make the next generation. That's intended.

But children are less able to see that big picture. feel their own loss very acutely and they don't get as much comfort from the success of the group as a whole. If it's my bean seed that was one of the three that didn't germinate or fell over in the wind and snapped, that's all I can see. My investment in the beans as a whole is not as big as when I'm an adult and the successes of that whole class group of beans is not my success and what I'm interested in is my bean.

If you find this is an issue that comes up, you can plan for it by avoiding identifiers on seeds. If you're working in a class group or you've got several siblings at home that are planting together and they're only planting one each, it's sometimes better to keep the pots the same and not label the plants with the child's name. Then no one will know whose plants have failed and you can focus on the ones that have survived.

Another way to do it is to sow several of the seed. If you want children to know which seeds are theirs and care for them properly, then let them plant several so that they can overcome the fact that the germination rate might not be perfect or that some of them might die.

Also, you can get them to work in teams. If several children sow seeds and then pool the plants together and work together to care for them, this allows for some of them to fail while the individual investment as part of that team is maintained.

And my fifth and last reason why sometimes planting projects can be tricky with kids is that children are impatient. Their concept of time is not the same as ours. And the younger the child, the longer and more elastic time can feel. Time's incredibly long when you're four. Waiting for the parent to come off the phone can seem like hours. Your birthday is always years away. And something like a leek plant that takes months and months to develop might as well have been planted last century.

On the first few tries of planting something, the concept that they take a long time to grow is a huge idea just by itself. So if you start with something that's slow to mature, it can be very off-putting for children and they can lose interest or heart.

You can plan for this by starting younger children off with fast maturing crops and then build up slowly over time. So start with radishes, salad leaves and peas. When they've got the idea of the cycle of a plant, you can gradually build up the length of time between sowing and harvest. Of course, if you've got space and time to grow a variety of things, you can choose plants to mature every couple of weeks. So there's something fast, something medium or something slow to harvest and they've always got something to focus on.

If you are sowing something which takes a long time to mature have an interim project in between to maintain their interest. Things like mustard cress or sprouting seeds in jars are very quick and satisfying and sprout in only a few days. If you're planting slower growing things like root crops outside, you could plant lettuces in between the rows so that they can have something growing quickly. Or if you're growing beans, could grow radishes next to it. They will come up faster than the bean plant will.

Another way to keep their interest is to let them see what's happening under the soil. So instead of planting beans straight into the ground, start some off in a jar with cotton wool so they can see when they germinate and how the sprout gets to the top. Obviously you have to be very careful transplanting them that you don't break the sprout. But even better if you want, could sow some beans into soil and then some into jars at the same time so that children can see the activity of the one in the jar and then they can watch the ones that were in the soil and anticipate when they're going to poke through and they can understand that the same thing is happening to them as is happening in the jar.

A mixture of fast projects, medium projects and slow projects is always going to be more engaging for young children.

Joanne Roach (11:14)

So those are my five stumbling blocks to successful growing with very young children and some ideas on how to set things up for success. I hope they'll help you with your next planting project. As I said, this is from a free guide that you can download. If you go to my website, thefoodies.org and scroll halfway down on mobile or all the way down on desktop, you'll find a box where you can ask for that download. Or I will put a direct link in the show notes to that page and I hope you'll find it helpful.

I'll be back next time with a new episode, hopefully with a better microphone. So I hope to see you then. And in the meantime, happy eating.

00:00 Introduction

01:16 Children can be competitive - how to tackle this

03:36 Motor skills can be lacking - how to work with that

05:26 Children can find estimating hard - how to help

06:36 Nature isn't always fair to individuals

09:01 Children can be impatient - how to work with this