Joanne (00:00)
On today's Food for Kids, we learn how to keep young children busy and learning in a veg garden or allotment and the lessons that gardening has not only for our children, but for our parenting too.
Joanne (00:25)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today we're getting outside of the kitchen and the classroom and in fact totally outside the building altogether because we're talking about getting children into the garden to help them connect with their food through growing.
Through the years working in schools I've seen first hand how children can build their familiarity with the food on their plate in a totally non-pressured way by getting involved in growing and harvesting it. It's not as linear as "if they grow something they will eat it", although it is true that they do often want to try something more if they have an investment in it. It's more that they build an appreciation of what food is and where it comes from and just like with cooking and playing with food, it helps food to stop being this alien thing that just shows up on their plate with no context other than they're expected to put it in their mouth.
Growing actual food is obviously a great activity to build familiarity and I do lots of activities in my work around that. But an underpinning of growing things in general and understanding the natural world is also a great foundation for understanding how we fit into a food system and an ecosystem, so gardening of all kinds can be helpful for children's confidence with fruit and veg.
That said, gardening with little kids can be a bit daunting, especially if you're not super confident in the garden yourself. So today's episode is here to give you some tips and confidence. I'm talking to Susan Hodkin from Two Dots Garden about her experiences of gardening with young children and there's a real mix of some practical tips and some good mindset suggestions in here.
Susan grew up doing a lot of gardening. Her dad grew vegetables at top of her garden and she spent many hours out in the garden in her childhood. 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 there when she was tiny and then back in 2020 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. She now has two children and gardens with them in her backyard. But we talked a while ago about tips for all of us on keeping a toddler amused in the garden for so many hours and what life skills she thinks can be learned in a garden. So let's get to that interview.
Joanne (02:51)
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 (03:14)
So I'd kind of break it down into maybe a few different categories. So the first one, thing that I started doing quite early on was this idea of dens and structures and teepees, things like that. And that was almost reliving my youth and childhood, you know, I was so into den building and things like that when I was a child. And so I thought, what better way? And as soon as I kind set the structure up of a bamboo kind of teepee, she was in there immediately and it was hide and seek and all this that and the other. I think at one point I accidentally kind of turned one of veg cages on its side and she just, she spent a good 20, 30 minutes at the age of probably two, just sat in there kind of sorting daisies or peas or whatever and just moving them from one pot to another. So just simple things. It's really not difficult to kinda build a teepee structure, you don't even have to do it with bamboo. You don't have to buy anything you could just use sticks and we've done that before as well. She absolutely loves the teepee sunflower dens I've done. We’ve also just done a pea tunnel that she loves to kind of run through and things like that.
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 at such an early age that Dot got her own watering can and was watering her plants herself, and I didn't really realize it was early for her to be doing it and 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, you know, she absolutely loves to harvest food as well. She has her own little garden as well in the allotment. So, that’s kind of her responsibility, that takes up a lot of a lot of her time at the allotment, 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 her tasks to do that maybe don't necessarily have an end point. 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. 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 repetitive for her, but she genuinely loves doing it. And she'll say, right, I'm bored of that now, or I've finished that now, mommy, what's next? And we'll go on to the next one. You can get a good, good five, 10 minutes out of each one of those if you're doing a bit of digging and things.
Joanne (06:32)
So you don't have to have an all singing, all 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 (06:40)
Absolutely. And funnily enough, they're the ones where she is interested for probably longest, I suppose it’s age appropriateness as well, isn't it? When she was kind of, you know, two and a half she loved the repetition. Someone asked me before about what Dot loves so much about the allotment and she loves helping. You know, “I've helped out here” and she absolutely gets so much from, “I've done a good job”, she’ll pass my dad kind of screws things like that or pick them all up and put them in a pot and “oh I've helped”, you know, so she loves it.
There will be an element where I have got actual toys, you 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. The sand pit, you know, I did pay for, but to be fair, that is one that she absolutely loves. Wildlife pond, it was a tub of water dug into the ground. She spent hours “Oh what's… is there any, is there any fish, is there any frogs?” And we then looked up what the little bugs were called she could see in there, you know, she, she absolutely loved doing that. And, that was a big thing actually during lockdowns and things. She said, “Can we go to the plot, see if there's any frogs?” You know, that was a daily thing getting up there.
I also made her a fairy garden, which she absolutely loved. 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. Loads of time spent loving it, talking about it for days.
And the other thing I'd say is, yes sometimes I put a lot of effort into make things fun. You know, sometimes we do have garden activities, gardening projects, but then sometimes I just really don't. I just leave her to it and she just gets on with it. 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, but most of the time she's digging up a garden and whatever else she wants to do.
Joanne (09:16)
I speak to a lot of. parents and childcarers actually who either garden or cook with children and they get very stressed about it because. 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 about like 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 (09:44)
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. You know, so 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. ometimes we go up there and she's literally like, “Mummy, I don't wanna leave. I just wanna stay here all day.”
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 digging up what she thought was a weed and it's actually one of my favourite plants. That not what I want the allotment to be for her. I want it to be safe for 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 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, you 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 (11:43)
That's good. And I also 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 where is a right and a wrong answer, a lot of children can find that very difficult. Whereas 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. 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 we only have so much control over nature.
Susan (12:25)
Absolutely, Absolutely. And 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, oh well, those sunflowers didn't grow because maybe we didn't water them enough or maybe we overwatered them or maybe 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, yeah I can put all the effort in the world in into it but
sometimes it's not going to work, but that's also okay.
Joanne (13:06)
And as you say, always compensations. When one crop doesn't work another crop somehow is glorious that year. And that's really life, isn't it? Things don't go right in one place, but they'll go brilliantly in some other place in your life.
Susan (13:18)
Absolutely, for me the learning happens from the experiences. That's what I want her to take home from it.
Joanne (13:29)
I really find that approach of Susan's quite inspirational because I definitely fit into 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 everyone has the best outcome. But one of the things that parenting has in common with gardening is that it teaches you that you can't control everything, that we can have a plan and try and stick to it, but some things will happen that make us need to adapt and learn patience and flexibility. And while in parenting it is good to teach our kids to strategize a bit and think things through sensibly, actually if we try to tightly control all the variables of all the activities that our children do, they never get the opportunity to learn to cope with what happens when things deviate from the plan. So I agree with Susan that the garden's a brilliant place to teach that resilience, that humility in the face of nature, and the ability to see that failure is usually not a catastrophe.
Susan's photos at Two Dots Garden are on Instagram and there's a lovely long back feed of posts to inspire you so I hope you'll check them out. I'll put the link in the show notes. If you want some other ideas for things to do with your kids in the garden this month, then go to my website at thefoodies.org where there are some ideas for every month or you can get printables of activities sent to you every month in the Little Foodies Club. I'd be really chuffed if I've got you inspired to grow something with your children this year.
I hope to see you later in the week for the next episode and in the meantime, happy growing and happy eating.
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