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10 Tips For Gardening With a Toddler

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10 Tips For Gardening With a Toddler

By | April 11th, 2013 at 2:56 pm

We know that our little ones love helping. We know that they are usually picky eaters. Almost every avid gardener I know attributes their love for growing things to fond memories of digging in their mom’s or grandma’s garden. Which is how it’s supposed to be. A passion for growing our own food is something that indeed is passed down generationally – which is exactly why farming most often a family run-business, passed down through-out the generations.

There’s nothing more rewarding (arguably) than eating food that you’ve grown from seed to table. Young children especially, glory in this kind of bounty. I remember eagerly digging in the garden to find carrots as a young one. I would often be caught mid-way to my mouth with one before it was even washed. Today, now more than ever, the importance of growing our own food within our families is very real. We may not all want to admit to the rapidly growing reality regarding what is happening to our natural resources or the farming industry and the freedom to grow organic, heirloom seeds. It’s all become a controversial, sensitive subject.

Understandably. The thought of having no control over eating food that is contaminated with things we know aren’t good for us is overwhelming and seemingly impossible to avoid. We can start small. Within our families. By growing some of our favourite fruits and veggies. It doesn’t have to be grandiose. You don’t need a yard. As with anything, there’s always learning curve involved if you want to be successful with anything.

It can be fun and I guarantee your toddlers will love it. They’ll love growing it, learning, helping and most of all; eating the fruits of their labour! Every gardening parent I’ve spoken to, testifies that their kids are way less picky eaters and go for the fresh stuff.

Slideshow Loading


  • Fun in The Garden

    Little ones, even before the age of 2 can get involved…


  • Pint Sized Tools

    Tools that that are safe and manageable for their chubby little hands will totally enhance their experience. Plus, they are adorable! We have this one.


  • Give The Age Appropriate Tasks

    Depending on their age, they may not be able to do any planting – but they can help you water or do it on their own. They can help pluck and pick. They can dig in the dirt and make you a mean mud pie!


  • Fabulous Pickers

    This is the best part (well, next to eating). This is when it all soaks in for them – that they can eat what they’ve grown. Let them pick (and eat) away!


  • Start a Sprout Project

    Germinate some seeds between layers of wet paper-towel and then place in a zip lock bag with on top of a warm windowsill. Put up a visually fun seed to sprout chart for them. Use egg cartons or toilet paper rolls to make mini planters and have them help you get started with sprouting inside!


  • Let Them Bury Their Sprouts

    Again, this one is age dependant. For example – my 3.5 year old could do this – when my 21 month old would probably be too rough with delicate sprouts.


  • Install a Toad Faery House

    Mandatory.
    Learn more via Spoonful


  • Make a Spot in The Garden Just For Them

    Aside from the faery toad house that is. A place where they are free to dig and muck about. Planting a couple of sunflowers here would be a great idea – especially the stalk-ones, they are so fun to watch grow! Your kid will be highly amused that they’ll end up bigger than they are.


  • Grow Kid Friendly Plants

    Things that are easy to plant, grow and dig up.


  • Grow Their Fave Fruits Veggies

    Most little ones love the sweetness and crunch of carrots, or strawberries and tomatoes – make sure to plant a couple of the ones that your kid loves!


  • Label Making

    Rain, wind-proof and toddler approved! Or you could make wooden spoon labels together – or just old-school popsicle sticks. Remember to use water-proof markers. Yea, they’ll likely get it on themselves – and yes, it will eventually come off.
    Learn more via Little Green Fingers

______________________________________________________________

More Babbles From Selena…

Selena is a crafty, culinary mom. Regular writer here and on Disney Baby. Part-time mischief maker, all the time geek. Proud of her Anishinaabe roots.

Elsewhere on the internets…

Via her humble beginnings, mastering in general mayhem: le petit rêve

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How does your garden grow: Reader shares raised beds tips – Record

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A Record Searchlight reader this week shares information about raised beds she started in her garden this year.

Jeri has a small yard, and plans to grow a variety of vegetables and even watermelon in the beds. The seeds are just starting to sprout.

Whether you grow tomatoes in a planter on an apartment balcony or have a 5-acre spread of fruits and vegetables, the Record Searchlight invites you to share images and stories of your garden.

Each week in the Home Garden section we will feature images and brief stories by our readers and their gardens. Proud of that new planter box you just finished? Let us know. Seedlings just peak from the soil? Capture that early moment. Rose bushes blooming? Share the colors.

To participate, email your photo to senior editor Carole Ferguson at cferguson@redding.com. You can also upload images to Infocus.Redding.com. Don’t have a computer but definitely have a green thumb? You can also drop off your photo in person or by mail to the Record Searchlight, 1101 Twin View Blvd., Redding, CA, 96003. Be sure to include your name, town of residence, a description of what’s in the photo, and when the image was taken. If you have advice for fellow gardeners, feel free to include that too.

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Gardening event and some lawn tips

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Make plans to attend Celebrate Spring Gardening. This event is being offered by CCC-Columbus with help from UNL Extension Master Gardeners.

The event will be held April 19 from 4-7:30 p.m. at Highland Park Church. For information, call Karen Moroczek at (402) 562-1249.

At the event, learn about gardening and do a little shopping. A variety of garden sessions, such as new Proven Winners, growing great tomatoes, and perennials that thrive in the sun will be offered, along with sessions on gardening photography, backyard bird feeding and flower arranging.

A garden market will be set up, and a box lunch will be part of your $20 registration.

Is it time to? This is the most common question I hear in spring. Here’s the answer to two of the most common lawn related questions.

The No. 1 question is about applying preemergence herbicide for crabgrass. Last week soil temperatures in Platte County averaged 45 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a good 10 degrees colder than the majority of crabgrass seed will even begin to germinate.

If you apply your own preemergence herbicide for crabgrass, wait until late April or early May to apply. By waiting, one application will provide effective control. While professional lawn care services have been applying these products, in most cases they make two applications during the season.

A benefit to applying your own is one application can be made at the best time for controlling crabgrass and at the best time for fertilizing. Money is saved and less pesticide is used. Since most crabgrass herbicides are sold as part of fertilizers, waiting until after soil temperatures have warmed to apply promotes a healthier turf less prone to disease.

If you have or will be seeding or overseeding the lawn, preemergence herbicides for crabgrass control cannot be applied to the area. These products will kill young turfgrass seedlings as well as crabgrass seedlings.

The second most common lawn question is about power raking and aerating. April is the month to do both. They can also be done in September.

Aeration is a practice that can be done as often as possible. The soil does need to be moist, but not wet, for effective core aeration.

Core aeration removes plugs of soil. This relieves soil compaction and promotes root and rhizome growth. It increases infiltration of rain and irrigation water and fertilizer into soil. When overseeding, it provides holes for seed to fall into for seed to soil contact.

Power raking removes thatch. This practice is hard on turfgrass and can stir up weed seeds. We only recommend power raking when the true thatch layer exceeds one-half inch. Thatch is a reddish brown mat-like layer found between the soil and green grass. It is made up of dead roots and rhizomes and is most common on highly maintained lawns.

A half-inch thatch layer is beneficial for turfgrass. It protects the plant crown from traffic and temperature extremes. Excessive power raking could prevent this half-inch layer from developing, creating stress for the lawn. However, once true thatch exceeds one-half inch, power raking is the only way to reduce it.

Some homeowners lightly power rake to clean up the lawn in spring. This makes the homeowner feel better, more than it helps the lawn. It is fine to do; however, be sure that core aeration is also practiced. If you only have time or money for one of these practices, core aeration is the one to go with.

Kelly Feehan is a UNL extension educator-horticulture. She can be reached at (402) 563-4901 or by email at either environment.unl.edu or platte.unl.edu.

 

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Home and Garden Landscape Workshop Offers Tips

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Two
Cozad Master Gardeners have teamed up to host a Home and Garden Landscape
Workshop on Saturday, April 20, at the Dawson County Extension Office meeting
room on the Dawson County Fairgrounds in Lexington.

The free workshop will run from 10 a.m. until noon and will include two informational
sessions.

  •  “Pots,
    Pots and More Pots – Show Stopping Containers for Your Home and Landscape” with
    M.J. Hart will include helpful tips on container plant selection and care.
  • “If
    Trees Could Talk … They Would Say ‘I’m Thirsty'” with Cynthia Halbgewachs will
    include information on tree care in the current drought situation.

For more information, contact Hart at 308-784-3556.

 

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Grow Your Own Food: 5 Gardening Tips For Early Spring

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Sprouts are just beginning to pop up – time to start garden planning! Photo by Sara B.
Over the last few seasons, we’ve become avid gardeners, both in a community garden plot and on our porch. This season, with the help of an expert, we’re going to take it to the next level. No more tiny window boxes of flowers for us — now it’s time to see how much food we can pack into our small urban spaces.

If you look outside right now, you won’t see a lot of food growing, unless there is some sort of new variety of grey squash that is blending in with the sky. But that doesn’t mean a home gardener has nothing to do. Beds need to be cleaned out, seeds and starts need to be ordered, and a lot of decisions need to be made. What can you grow in a container? What is best saved for a garden plot or bought at the farmers market?

To get answers to these questions (and tons more throughout the season) we turned to gardener extraordinaire Sara Gasbarra. Gasbarra is the owner of Verdura, a company that designs and maintains restaurant and residential gardens. We aren’t talking ornamental shrubbery — this woman grows food. She graciously agreed to help us through the growing seasons of 2013. To begin, here are some tips to get you through that early spring, pre-planting time when most of us are itching to get in the garden if only it would stop raining.

1.) Make sure you know which plants to start early and which can wait, and start planning now.

Not everything gets planted at the same time. This was a rude awakening to us the first time we tried to plant a garden. We assumed we could just plant tomato seeds and lettuce seeds next to each other on the same day in June and everything would just … work out. Gasbarra puts us right:

“Home gardeners need to consider the plant and veggies that are “long term” and those that are “short term” — and in this case, we’re talking days to maturity. If you are growing radishes, the days to maturity is about 25 days, so you can plant these early in the season (as soon as April, they do well in cool weather), but if you get a late start (say June/July), you’ll be okay too, because their growing cycle is so short.

“The varieties you need to be wary of as far as timing goes are the long-term veggies: the ones you plant in the spring that stay put all season long: tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, brussels sprouts, cucumbers, summer and winter squash, cauliflower, etc. These guys need the entire season, so you want to get them in the soil as early as you can. For brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts) — they can handle cool weather, so mid-late April is best. For the rest, mid- to late-May. You can plant these guys in June, but it’s already risky. If you get a very late start on your garden, say July — I’d skip the long-term plants and just grow root crops, greens and herbs.

Also be sure to distinguish which plants can grow from seed in the garden and which need to be started indoors/bought from a store. If you’re a fan of technology, there are plenty of online apps to plan your garden that come with all of this information built-in. We’ve been playing with Smart Gardener, but there are plenty of others.

2.) Some things just might not be worth growing in your urban garden.

When we first started gardening, we used the “square foot” method — you break the garden plot into squares and divide the crop up that way. The upside: it seems like you have so much space! The downside: one head of cauliflower or broccoli is a whole square, and it takes all season to grow. This goes double for container gardeners, who have even more limited space. Are there some things that are best to leave to farmers with more land?

“Some big stuff takes up lots of space and has a very long growing life — cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, pumpkins, summer and winter squash. If you have the space for them — go ahead! But these guys require a ton of space. In addition, summer squash and winter squash are more prone to disease (powdery mildew) and pests (squash vine borer insect) — you’ve got precious real estate in the garden, these plants take up tons of space and if a plant becomes infected and eventually dies — you’ve now wasted lots of space.

Our tip? Support your local farmers who know what they are doing and maximize your own land to grow the things you can grow well.

3.) Some plants are better for porch gardens than others.

We’re lucky enough to have a beautiful garden plot with the Peterson Garden Project where we will be growing our tomatoes and cucumbers. But we also have a porch, and many of our garden buds have nothing but a porch. Should we just throw any old plant in a pot on the porch and see what happens?

“You want to stick to plant varieties that stay small. In the spring I like growing baby greens from seed (arugula, mache, broccoli raab, mustard), non-trellising snap peas, radishes and scallions. In the summer, I then include tomatoes, herbs (basil, tarragon, thyme, mint, lemon verbena, anise hyssop, rose geranium, savory, rosemary and sage are my favorites!) and chile peppers.”

You can always be ambitious (this year, we’re going to try to trellis cucumbers on our porch railing) but don’t try anything too crazy, or it’ll just end in tears and wasted space.

4.) Make sure you get the right containers.

The first time we tried growing things on our porch, we just bought random pots from Home Depot and lined them up. Things grew, but we didn’t really maximize our yields — and the shallow depth of the soil combined with the crazy heat of last summer meant that our plants had to be watered practically every 20 minutes. Gasbarra plants in hundreds of containers per year, so she knows what to buy.

“Earthboxes are great — they are extremely lightweight and have a water reservoir in the bottom of the container that helps feed the plants from the bottom, in addition to being watered from the top. I recently came across a company called Gronomics based out of Minnesota which has a great selection of easy to install/construct cedar boxes, which are very attractive.”

5.) Buy seeds and transplants from reputable sources.

We have nothing against your neighborhood hardware store, but if you’re looking for heirloom varieties, organic seedlings or other specialized plants, you have to know where to buy them. We buy all of our tomato and pepper seedlings straight from Seed Savers Exchange (they ship them live) and Gasbarra has some favorite sources of her own.

“I buy most of my veggie starts at Green City Market. The farmers who sell starts in May and June have some really cool stuff and unique, unsual varieties in addition to the more popular, common stuff. Leaning Shed Farm, Radical Root, Tomato Mountain, Genesis Growers, Growing Power, Nichols Farm and Orchard and Smits Farm all have wonderful starts.

As added bonus from buying starts at the market, if you run into an issue mid-season, you have a whole bunch of “experts” you can reach out to or visit on Wednesdays and Saturdays to get advice! The farmers are happy to answer questions. In addition to GCM, I love Anton’s Greenhouse in Evanston — its a funky little place tucked away in a residential neighborhood in southwest Evanston with a beautiful selection of plants (ornamental and edible) and they are extremely friendly and helpful.”

In addition to these locations, Gasbarra suggests Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company as good sources for seeds.

Start planning your garden now! A few hours of planning on a rainy Saturday can go a long way towards sating your garden urges.

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Tim’s Tips: Choose soil carefully for garden beds

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April 10, 2013

Tim’s Tips: Choose soil carefully for garden beds


Tim’s Tips



Tim Lamprey
The Daily News of Newburyport


Wed Apr 10, 2013, 03:00 AM EDT

The temperatures keep bouncing up and down, which makes it hard to figure out what you can be doing in the garden and in your yard. Let me take a few moments to fill you in on what you can be doing now.

Hopefully by now, the snow has melted in your vegetable garden. The vast majority of your vegetables will benefit from an application of lime in the soil prior to planting. Yes, you can add the lime after you have planted your early vegetables. Most vegetables will benefit from some compost added to the soil. This can be done when you turn over the soil prior to planting.

You should also add some organic fertilizer to the soil prior to planting. The fertilizer will slowly release its nutrients and feed the growth of new roots into the soil.

If you haven’t set up a vegetable garden and you have been thinking about putting in some raised beds, now would be a good time to do so. There are many companies that make raised bed kits for constructing your garden. One of the problems that I have noticed is that the kits are more flimsy each year.

We have carried a line of raised beds for a number of years. A company called Frame It All makes beds using re-enforced plastic timbers. There are two rows of reinforcement running the length of the timbers. This reinforcement prevents the beds from bowing out when you add the soil. If your timbers bow out in your raised beds, the soil will fall out the sides and you will soon have a mess on your hands.

Once you have the beds in place, don’t skimp on the soil. I have heard all the horror stories of people buying poor quality soil to fill the beds. The soil eventually packs down and turns into a poor growing medium for your plants. The result is a poor harvest of vegetables.

The yields that we get from the soil are fantastic. Remember, once you fill those raised beds, you are going to be using that soil for years to come. Start off with good quality soil and you will be able to successfully grow vegetable in your raised beds.

If you haven’t started to remove the winter mulch from your perennial beds and from around your rose bushes, now is the time to do so. The soil is warming up and your plants will begin to awaken from their winter nap. Once the mulch is removed, you should add some lime to the soil if you did not do so in the fall. An application of organic fertilizer will get the plants to begin to grow again.

Speaking of rose bushes, you should be pruning out any dead branches that didn’t make it through the winter. You can also prune back your butterfly bushes and the Rose of Sharon. Your spring flowering shrubs should be pruned back after they are done flowering.

Your blueberry bushes, grape vines, strawberry plants and raspberry bushes will benefit from an application of organic fertilizer.

Well, that should keep you busy this week. I’ll talk to you again next week.

—

Tim Lamprey is the owner of Harbor Garden Center on Route 1 in Salisbury. His website is www.Harborgardens.com. Do you have questions for Tim? Send them to ndn@newburyportnews.com, and he will answer them in upcoming columns.







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Time saving garden tips

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SOME days there’s just not enough time to get everything done let alone keep everyone happy and on those days the garden takes last place on the to-do list.

To help anyone else who has my sort of time crunch, here are a few of my tips and tricks designed for the out-of-time gardener.

Tip 1: Weeding has to be the least enjoyable and most time consuming task in garden maintenance. To avoid weeding I keep all of the soil in the garden mulched year-round. I even mulch my containers to avoid having to weed them which also help to prevent drought stress. I use wood chips for mulching which I obtain from my friendly neighbourhood arborist.

When wood chips are unavailable, I use leaves from my own trees or those found during fall in the nearby city park. The trick is to make sure that every last inch of earth is covered with a thick layer of mulch so weed seeds cannot germinate.

Tip 2: Lawn cutting for some people is a form of therapy. For me lawn cutting is work. So I have eliminated the time most people spend cutting lawn down to zero. How? I killed all of the lawn in the front yard and installed planting beds interwoven with a bluestone patio and walkway. In the backyard, there’s a small patch of lawn that I refuse to cut, so my wife cuts it. The trick is to change the design of the garden to a less labour intensive style and if that does not work, then delegate.

Tip 3: I like growing veggies but much of my garden is dedicated to hardy ornamentals, so I grow veggies in containers. Veggies grown in pots take half the time to plant and maintain because there are no veggie planting beds to maintain. I can also change my veggie selections each year and move them around the yard as desired. Yes I do need to obtain or grow new soil for my veggie pots each year but that is what compost piles are for. When planting veggies in pots, bigger and deeper pots are best to provide a deep, cool root run. A pot the size of a washing machine is ideal but hard to find. Try upcycling or repurposing a pot from some other sort of container. One tip for planting pots, do not add shreds of foam, broken pots or any other manner of shrapnel to the bottom of the pot for drainage. Adding shrapnel to the bottom of the pot is a myth and those pieces simply perch the water table higher and deny plants the full depth of soil.

Tip 4: Solving pest or disease problems can be difficult, time consuming and often the problem persists from year to year. Some plants are important and worth fighting for, some are not. To avoid pest and disease problems I use the following pest and disease strategies: Firstly, avoid the use of chemical fertilizer because it forces soft lush growth that predisposes plant to pest and disease attack.

Secondly, choose the right plant for the right place, not the right plant for the place I want it to grow. Thirdly, plants that have a chronic pest and disease problem are ruthlessly ripped out and thrown into the compost or green waste bin. A case in point, I recently found that thrips were overwintering on my hellebores. Thrips are tough, persistent and cannot be killed in one year by any means. So I dug out all of my hellebores and tossed them in the green waste bin. The tip: a good gardener knows how to kill plants as well as he or she grows plants.

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Lawn and garden tips from ExxonMobil and Monsanto

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Wed Apr 10, 2013 at 02:50 PM PDT

Lawn and garden tips from ExxonMobil and Monsanto

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Originally posted to Comics on Wed Apr 10, 2013 at 02:50 PM PDT.

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Monthly home garden and landscape tips from Wayne County Master Gardeners

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Increasing daylight hours indicate that outdoor gardening activities are just around the corner. Our Master Gardeners will be continuing our vegetable trials at our demonstration site located at the CCE office in Newark again this year. If you stop by later this spring you’ll be able to see what vegetables we’ve planted, plants to attract beneficial insects, our trellis and straw bale garden systems, and several composting systems.

We want to encourage you to include plants that attract beneficial insects too. Beneficial insects can have a significant impact on populations of pests in home gardens and landscapes. To learn more about these important garden helpers call our Master Gardeners.

We also have a new Beneficial Insects presentation that is available to groups of 10 or more in Wayne County. If you’re group and would like to learn more about Beneficial Insects please contact us to get on our presentation schedule.

Those of you interested in trees might want to take part in Project Budbreak. A network of citizen scientists is being established in central New York to observe the timing of flowering, leaf development, fruiting, and leaf drop in populations of common native trees and herbaceous species. This site www.budbreak.org will help observers to enter their data on the timing of important plant events through the growing season.

This project would be a great way to involve our youth in nature too!

Below we have included information about our upcoming events, garden and landscape tips for March, an article written by one of our Master Gardeners, and a list of pollinator plants attractive to beneficial insects.

Monthly garden and home grounds tips:

Tips for Helping out our pollinators

• Flowers clustered in clumps of at least four feet in diameter are more attractive to pollinators than scattered individual flowers.

• A succession of flowering plants that lasts from spring through fall will support a range of bee species.

• Flowers of different shapes will attract different types of pollinators.

• Pesticides are a major threat to insect pollinators.

Tips from Dave Reville, CCE Wayne County Master Gardener:       

Bring a touch of spring into your home by saving the pruinings from your flowering shrubs and forcing them into bloom indoors.

This is a good time to check the stakes around your burlap wind barriers, which you erected to lessen wind damage to newly, planted evergreens. Drive the stakes in deeper to tighten the barriers as necessary as windy, cold weather will still be with us.

Gently push any plants that have been heaved out of the soil back into the soil to prevent further winter damage to root systems.

Keep checking the trunks of your new trees and shrubs for rodent damage. If you surrounded the trunk with a hardware cloth wire cylinder, be sure that it is still in place and doing its job.

Check fruit tree guards and other determents to mice, vole and rabbit damage. Trim and broken limbs you find, and if you are using soap bars as a deterrent to deer grazing, add new ones now. Remember that they need to be replaced frequently.

Fruit trees-apple and pear- are pruned during February and mid-March. When performing this chore, remember that fruiting is most prolific on wood exposed to ample sunlight and it is advisable to not remove any more than one third of the tree growth in any one year. The trees can be pruned in dormancy up to “bud Swell”.

For a larger fall crop, ever bearing raspberries can be cut to the ground now. For all other varieties pruning can be postponed for a while.

If you are planning to add new fruit plants to your garden, check carefully for varieties that are disease resistant and hardy. In terms of the fruit trees, know the rootstocks.

This is an excellent time of year to think through what vegetables you will be planting and, based upon your garden journal, what varieties did not perform well or had succumbed to pest problems.

Houseplants tend to suffer abuse from lack of humidity inside our winter homes and exhibit various forms of leaf and tip browning. The easiest way to add humidity to plants is to place a pan of water near the plants and, as it evaporates, moisture is added to the atmosphere immediately surrounding the plants. Portable humidifiers also help as does a humidifier installed on your furnace. Another technique, which works for some gardeners, is to take a large-baking pan or cookie sheet, add a layer of gravel on top. Place the plant pots on top of this and add water almost to the top of the stone layer. Don’t allow plants sit in water.

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Tips: Potted Vegetable and Herb Gardens

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Who knew you could have a garden in pots?

Geri Van Wezel-Bolen in the Dearborn Market Gardening Center said it’s easy to have a small vegetable or herb garden, even when living in an apartment. All you need are the right ools and plenty of sunlight.

Potting soil, rather than top soul, is key to a successful potted garden. A heavy concrete or plastic pot will keep the soil at the right temperature through potential chilly nights.

Dearborn Gardening Tips on Patch:

Dearborn Market has been in Holmdel since 1925, serving the community with everything from local and fresh produce, bakery goods and gardening supplies and experts.

Check our Patch Community Calendar for upcoming gardening classes and community events.

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