Gardening With Kids

Gardening with kids is a wonderful activity. It is amazing to see the astonishment on a young child’s face when something that they planted begins to grow! Older kids can be involved in the whole process of planning out, planting, watering and harvesting.

Gardening does not offer the instant rewards that many children expect of life these days. It can help them to learn patience as well as the importance of taking care of things over a period of time. Kids who are used to getting everything they want immediately in our electronic age can benefit greatly from a return to old fashioned activities like this.

So what should you grow when gardening with kids? Flowers, vegetables and herbs can all be used. If there is something that they particularly like to eat, for example cucumber, that would be ideal. Try to plan so that different things will be ready at different times. Flowers often appear quickly and a child can take great pride in creating a flower arrangement for the table from his or her own garden.

With small children, less is often better. Just a tray of seeds in the house or a container in the yard will be enough. At first, they will rush to it every day to see if something has appeared. Later, you can enjoy measuring the growing plant with them, or counting leaves and flowers.

Of course you will want to avoid poisonous plants if you have very young children. Check all the plants that you are thinking of using, because you may be surprised at what is poisonous. For example, tomato and potato leaves are toxic. With older children, you may decide to go ahead with plants like these and simply warn them. After all, they will come across poisonous plants in nature and most parents would agree that it is better for them to be knowledgeable than ignorant.

The garden also offers an opportunity to talk to kids about difficult subjects including death and reproduction in a very natural setting. Having a child around plants is a good reason not to use pesticides, but they will no doubt come across predators feeding on insects. They may also be unhappy when plants die off at the end of the season. This can be a gentle first lesson in the sad fact of life that even what we love most can die.

If you have no interest in gardening yourself, it may be better not to fake it. Kids can usually tell and their own enthusiasm will quickly die. Instead, consider asking your parents or in-laws to take on this activity with them, if they are keen gardeners. Older people often love to grow things too and gardening with kids can create a wonderful bond between grandparents and their grandkids.

Finding The Right Organic Gardening Book For You

Organic gardening books can be very useful for anybody who wants to begin gardening in the organic way. This means, of course, avoiding use of any harmful chemical pesticides or fertilizers. In addition, if you want a truly organic garden, you will need to begin from seeds or bedding plants that have been raised the organic way.

When you are choosing organic gardening books there are certain things that you should look out for. Keep in mind that there is no need to choose a book that gives a lot of information about different plants. You can get that information from any gardening book. What you need from a book about organic gardening is the information that is specific to working in your garden in the natural way.

Pest Control

Organic gardening books will normally contain some information on pest control. This is an important subject because the green gardener will not use most of the common pesticides and sprays that can be found in plant nurseries. Instead, you will want to know about pest control methods that are less harmful to the environment.

There are some natural methods of killing certain pests that you can learn about from books about organic gardening. In addition, there are many methods of keeping pests out of your garden without actually killing them. These include adding certain plants to your garden that pests do not like, constructing your beds in a way that deters others, and encouraging predators that will feed on the pests, including birds, ladybugs and other plant-friendly insects.

Which method of pest control should you use? It depends on the range of plants that you are growing. Therefore, a good organic gardening book will have a large section on the different types of pest control that are suitable for different plants.

Planting Plan

How you plant your organic garden is very important to the health of the plants. Many organic gardeners like to follow a system of ‘companion planting’ where plants that will support each other are planted close together. Organic gardening books often carry a list of companion plants.

It is also useful to think about which plants should be close to the house. Organic gardeners will think not only about the appearance of their garden when laying it out, but also about practical aspects such as keeping plants that need a lot of care close to the house, and also those that you will be harvesting often, such as herbs.

Fertilizer

Finally, your chosen volume should include information on how to put goodness back into the soil. Methods can include plant rotation and composting as well as using store bought fertilizer or manure. You can expect to learn how to get the absolute best from your garden and its soil in organic gardening books.

Why Buy Organic Seeds?

If you want to have a truly organic garden, you will need to buy organic seeds. Plants raised from any other type of seed are not truly organic, even if you have never used pesticide or weed killer in your garden. Standard seeds may have been subject to all kinds of sprays while they were forming on the parent plant.

In addition, non organic seeds could even be genetically modified. Genetically modified or engineered plants have had their genes altered to encourage them to have certain qualities, such as disease resistance, higher productivity, sweeter taste, etc.

This is different from selective breeding and hybridization which has been going on for centuries in order to produce the vegetables and fruits that we have today. With genetic modification, there is no way of knowing what else might be altered when the genetic material is tampered with. Even an apparently beneficial alteration such as making a plant more resistant to disease can have a negative effect if this means that bacteria evolve to survive. There is a risk that human diseases could become increasingly resistant to antibiotics as a result. There is also a risk of harming biodiversity and perhaps producing new allergens or even new diseases.

If you try to shop locally for organic seeds you may find there is not much choice available in your local stores. Of course this varies according to where you live. Some people are lucky enough to live close to a good nursery with a large range of organic plants and seeds.

However, even if you do have trouble finding organic seeds in your local area, there is no problem because you have a huge choice on the internet. As more and more gardeners and agriculturalists are turning to organic gardening methods, more organic seeds become available. Not only can you now get them for most every type of vegetable that you would want to grow in your garden, but in many cases you even have the choice of several different varieties of each plant.

Ordering online is ideal because being so small and light, seeds are very cheap to ship. You can have a large order and still pay very low shipping charges.

The most popular organic seeds are for vegetables that will be grown for food. This is not surprising. People who grow items to eat do not want to have them contaminated with pesticides and weed killers even before they are planted. In a flower garden, while purists may still want to choose organic, it is more likely that people will buy regular seeds and simply avoid using environmentally unfriendly products on the growing plants. But for anything that will be going onto your table, organic seeds are best.