Garden Guru: Growing Up

Beans make a good starting point because of their quick results. Photo / Supplied

Give a kid a trowel and they'll throw it or lose it, but hand them a hose, a worm or an empty basket for picking and they're in heaven.

I discovered how unpredictable and messy kids and gardening can be when I set up a school club last year.

They were indifferent about the things I assumed they would love - such as sowing wildflowers. But I watched in amazement as even the most delicate of waifs, when handed a spade, would attack the ground like a hardened navvy; and I was astonished at their frenzy of excitement on cooking up the first harvest of broad beans.

Yet many a successful gardener has admitted that in their early years, even with greenfingered parents, they ran the other way, not to return to the soil until they were settled down with children.

So it's amusing when author Janice Marriott confesses that, although she could probably coax cauliflowers from concrete and dazzles with the amount of produce she squeezes out of her modest Wellington garden, she never quite ignited the plant passions in her son. Now 35 and living in Auckland, he "at least manages to keep a handful of pot plants alive in his apartment".

Janice has always passionately believed that all children should at least be given a taste of gardening and the magic which plants and growing your own food brings. In the 80s she published two gardening books for children, and Common Ground, a book of letters between herself and a friend gardening very differently in rural NZ.

But with our recent rediscovery of the joys of growing your own, and with schools everywhere taking up hoes and spades, Janice felt inspired to blend together and update her books as Yates Young Gardener, adding tips and ideas to reach a new generation of budding horticulturists.

"My childhood memories are rooted in gardens" she says, "I still vividly recall with huge fondness my mother's vast greenhouse and exploring my grandfather's patch in Coventry with peas and beans towering overhead - that's how I'd love kids today to feel."

Janice is the perfect choice for a book designed to whet the appetite of the young. She has a wonderfully playful attitude to language and learning: writing your name on a kitchen towel with sprouting seed; sowing cress into an eggshell to become a green-haired monster; carrots as buried treasure to be unearthed.

To help capture children's enthusiasm Janice has conjured up cute companions - a worm and a ladybird who cheer on each project and chat to each other across the pages. Worms, bees and other insects are, after all, as much a part of gardening as plants, and children inherently head off on tangents in their thirst for knowledge for the little critter or something new.

"The key," Janice says, "is to give your children ownership. It could be carving their name into a pumpkin and watching it swell or making up their own names for plants instead of having to stumble over Latin."

She says it's very important to give each child his or her own bit of ground - even if it is just a container on an apartment balcony.

Whether it is a fat seed, a pansy with a winter of flowering ahead, or a bulb packed with promise, "kids love the idea of change and transformation".

So give them a plant, a plot, and quite possibly a book, and watch things grow.

IDEAS FROM JANICE MARRIOTT

Bean den

Climbing French or runner beans are fascinating to children - if only for their speed of growth.

They have attractive scented flowers which come in a range of colours and produce nutritious food. But why not take the fun further and make your bamboo supports into a teepee - the kids will have plenty of fun playing inside it.

Jar shake

What could be more attractive to a child than making a bit of mud?

However, adding water to your garden soil in a jam jar can be an effective way of teaching your children a bit about basic soil science.

Shake up your soil and water - let it settle overnight and in the morning you will have a banded settlement of the sand, clay and humus elements of your soil. The big sand particles settle first and the finest clay particles take the longest to float down to the bottom of the jar.

An ideal soil has equal quantities of each.