Category Archives: Gardening

Encouraging Kids to Garden

One of the reasons I love renting a house instead of a garden is that we have a back yard. We don’t have a place that we can dig up for a garden, but since much of the yard is wood chips rather than lawn or other plants, we built some garden boxes from scrap lumbar and grow plants there.

My children love this. They get to see the plants grow and see where their food comes from. That makes them luckier than a lot of children, who often have a disconnect about where food comes from.

The nice thing about using containers is that you can garden even in a small space. For those raising children in apartments or condos, you can do something as simple as grow herbs in the kitchen window.

Encouraging your children to garden has many benefits. They’re often interested in eating foods that they helped to grow. The flavor is better and the produce is fresh as can be. Continue reading →

He He He He… I’m Winning at Last!

My husband is finally getting just a little bit more into organic gardening. I think it’s more out of despair for how poorly our garden did last year than anything else, but it’s still a start!

He has started putting our veggie and fruit scraps into the blender with water to make some quick compost. I’ve been telling him for a while that a little bit of composting might be possible, even if a full compost heap would be tough here at this house we’re renting, as it doesn’t have a good place for one.

This last growing season was terrible for us. We garden partially for the food but also because the kids love helping out. It’s not easy… he built large containers that he put in the part of the yard our landlords covered in wood chips so that we could somehow have a garden. But he got the soil mix wrong or something, and that combined with a major heat wave really kept the garden from thriving. Continue reading →