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gardening: All things green.

Kinder-GardeningHow to teach your child to tend the land without losing your mind.

By Constance Casey
Posted Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 12:53 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The whole plot could be sunflowers from seed. Food plants that work well from seeds sown directly outdoors include beans, peas, carrots, radishes, and summer squash. If you combine sunflowers with food, place the sunflowers where they won't shade everything else.

For plants like tomatoes, buy seedlings. (There are very few home windowsills sunny enough to grow healthy tomato seedlings indoors.)

A surprisingly cool plant for children is Brussels sprouts. A 3-inch seedling grows a stupendously strong and thick trunk by harvest time. The sprouts are fantastic plucked when they're the size of a baby fingernail.

Should you grow a squash like zucchetta trombolina (one of the selections in the John Scheepers seed collection "A Child's Garden of Wonder"), harvest those green submarines when they're small, or you will be overwhelmed. Prickly squash leaves can irritate skin, not enough to hurt but enough to provide a lesson in how plants protect themselves from browsing animals.

Also look for plants that are very pleasant to touch. Many of the scented geraniums have leaves that are both velvety and fragrant. Lamb's ears really are gray and fuzzy, and easy to grow in well-drained soil.

For a child's cutting garden, cosmos and black-eyed Susans provide the classic grandmother-pleasing daisy shape. You will want to demonstrate to your youngster that when you pull on a flower stem, you often pull up the whole plant. Trust your child with small scissors with rounded ends.

Children are supposed to like plants that are pretty, but they really, truly like plants that are weird, even monstrous. One very easy monster perennial is joe pye weed, which can get to be 6 feet tall, with meadowy pink flowers that are attractive to butterflies.

The tropical plants commonly known as elephant ears are weirdly beautiful. One of them, esculenta black magic has huge leaves that emerge green and turn to purply-black. Another, Alocasia amazonica, has dark-green leaves with dramatic white veins, in the shape of an African mask.

There's an easy rose bush, Rosa chinensis mutabilis, with orange buds that open to yellow, orange, pink, and pinkish-red. Combine it with the buddleia that has orange-pink and purple all on the same flower.

~ Supervise watering. (Imagine that birthday party if one of the 4-year-olds gets a hold of a hose.) Watering is both the most important thing for keeping plants alive and the biggest danger in gardening with children, power saws aside. A blast of water tears or uproots small plants, washes away soil, and splatters leaves with mud.

It isn't easy to get across the concept of watering slowly and thoroughly, letting the water sink in. This is why God created watering cans. An adult or some calm, sane child should use the hose to fill the watering can. You then have a very pretty camera-ready tableau. Because your child will probably get bored after the second watering can, the adult in the garden needs to use a hose (with a soaker nozzle) to water the garden the next morning.

~ Finally, teach by example more than by explaining. If an adult is working in a concentrated, calm, meditative manner, it is a very good bet that a child will interrupt. With luck, the interruption will come with the question What are you doing and why?

The last but most important step: Take a look together every day at what's growing.

***

Some inspired advice: "Recognize that kids' gardening priorities are different, well, practically opposite of adults'." That comes from Cheryl Dorschner, a columnist at the Burlington Free Press. Here's a particularly good Web site for more information.

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Constance Casey, a former newspaper editor, was a New York City Department of Parks gardener for five years. E-mail gardening questions to .
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