Category Archives: Gardening

Does Gardening Encourage Kids to Eat Their Vegetables?

I’ve always been one of the lucky parents. My two oldest love their vegetables for the most part. I assume the baby will once she’s big enough.

I can’t really say that there’s a secret, as I’m sure that what we’ve done won’t work for every family. But it sure works for us.

I’ve often wondered if a part of it is that we introduced vegetables so very early. There’s some debate as to whether or not introducing veggies before fruits to a baby has any impact, but that’s what we did. We started our two oldest on green beans.

And when they got older, they loved green beans so much that they literally ate them like candy when we grew them in the garden for the first time. “Please, Mommy, can we have more green beans? Pleeease?”

It was cute. And how could I possibly say no?

The garden I think of as the other part of our secret. My kids love it. They love snacking from it. They love finding fresh food in it. They even had fun helping us plan it.

This year’s garden, unfortunately, is going to be inherited by whoever rents this place after we move out. I hope it happens soon enough that the garden survives. We’ve gotten some produce from it, and the kids have certainly been enjoying it all.

I won’t say my kids eat all the vegetables we’ve grown. But they’ve enjoyed most of it.

Mere exposure to a garden certainly isn’t enough. It took me a couple of days to get across to the neighbor’s kids that the front yard cherry tomato plant was not to supply them with ammunition for tomato fights. Grrrr!

I wouldn’t care if the neighbor kids wanted to snack on them the way my kids do, but I’m not going to encourage food fights! Such a waste. But they don’t like tomatoes, so they just saw them as ammo.

A big thing to remember is that even if the garden doesn’t encourage your kids to eat their vegetables, it can’t hurt to try. You’re increasing their exposure to fresh food, probably eating a bit better yourself if you’re the only one eating the produce, and so demonstrating better eating habits. It may pay off over a longer term.

Efficient Lawn Watering

Much of southern California is getting into stricter water restrictions right now, with a goal of cutting all water use by at least 20%. That’s a tough goal when you consider how many people have already been conserving. Most lawns in our area show it.

The typical restriction is along the lines of allowing people to water on certain days of the week between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m., and limiting sprinkler time to 10 minutes. Also they want people to keep an eye out for obvious water wastes, such as broken sprinklers, obvious leaks and sprinklers spraying more on sidewalks or streets than they should.

These restrictions are pretty good for cutting back water use for irrigation, which is a huge part of residential water use.

For the best results for your lawn, you need to water about 1 inch per week. That’s easy enough to measure if you put out an open, empty tuna can. If you can do it in one shot you should be able to reach the deeper roots of grass, which is the most effective.

Believe me when I say I don’t water mine this much, and it’s kind of brown. But my garden looks good.

Mowing less is also good. Taller grass shades the soil, and so less water evaporates from it. The grass also is then able to better stand getting less water.

My own favorite tip is to find more native plants to put in, rather than your typical lawn. There are grasses that do better with less water. My city suggests a list of plants that are California-friendly (PDF, pretty big). They also suggest only maintaining as much lawn as you need, and having drought resistant plants for the rest of the yard.

Our Broccoli Has Bolted – Mmmm, Flowers!

I knew buying broccoli for a spring planting was risky. Even told my husband we should wait for fall, but he wanted to plant it anyhow.

boltedbroccoliSo it’s no surprise that it has bolted already.

One important thing to remember about bolted broccoli – it still tastes good. My kids are utterly delighted with the taste of the flowers.

We’ve trimmed some for dinner. It has a really nice, kind of sweet taste. I almost don’t dare steam or otherwise cook it for fear of ruining the flavor.

I’m also eager for the next heads to appear around where we trimmed it. My mother was telling us about how she grew broccoli when we were kids. The heads get sweeter with each trim, she says, as well as smaller. She said we would go out and just snack on them.

Sounds good to me. Now I’m just hoping we get enough enjoyment from the lettuce we planted. I managed to keep my husband from planting the spinach until fall, but he couldn’t resist some random varieties that were already started at the garden center.

This is One Reason Why Eating Local & in Season Matters

I came across this really depressing but informative article on Gourmet.com about the use of slaves to harvest tomatoes. Pretty much if you eat tomatoes out of season, you’re eating food that was picked by people who are effectively slaves.

The article was published in March, but I only came across it recently while using Stumble Upon. Amazing the things I find there.

Pickers are lucky to pick a ton of tomatoes on a particular day, for which they would earn about $50. However, they have to be available even when there isn’t work, and they are generally charged outrageous rents for extremely poor housing.

They can even be beaten for being too sick to work.

Your choices matter. Pay attention to where you shop. The Campaign for Fair Food has gotten some companies to agree to give pickers a pay raise, although many farmers are refusing to cooperate or be a conduit for the raise.

At this point, Whole Foods is the only grocery chain signed on to not buy from growers who exploit workers so badly.

Almost as bad as the treatment so many workers labor under, are the people in the comments who feel they deserve such treatment for being in the United States illegally.

Yes, it’s hard to think of paying more for your food. But if you think of the people involved in the entire process of getting food to your table it might be worth it.

My Ugly Water-Saving Garden Solution

ugly-watering

We’ve been saving the gallon jugs from the apple juice we buy for about a year now. These containers are now being used to water our garden.

No, they aren’t pretty. But it’s the same principle as the Aqua Globes you can buy.

They’re working pretty well, although we don’t have quite enough bottles saved up for the whole garden yet. As you can see in the picture, they’re not that far apart, maybe a foot, foot and a half at most.

The nice thing is that the water is going right into the soil. No water sprayed into the air. Since we’re looking at a Stage 2 drought and mandatory water conservation coming up at the start of June, we’re trying to figure out how best to keep our garden alive with a minimum of water. Oh, and a minimum of budget. We don’t really have the finances for installing drip irrigation right now.

I have given some thought to the BPA in plastic issue with this, but I suspect it’s not that different from the yard’s sprinkler system, which I believe is installed using PVC plastic anyhow. The bottles are a #5 plastic. They’re not supposed to leech anything harmful… then again they are in the heat of the sun every day so who knows. Not exactly how they were meant to be used.

On the other hand, a lot of recyclers don’t take anything other than #1 or 2 plastics, which I think is true in my area. That means we’re keeping these out of the landfill for a while. I’m not too happy as a rule about buying things in plastic, but it’s hard to entirely avoid. Finding a new use for the plastic is the next best thing.