Growing Food and Kids

Today is guest post day in the WordCount 2010 Blogathon, and bloggers all over the Internet are swapping posts with other bloggers. Please welcome guest blogger Jodi Torpey, a Denver-based garden writer, master gardener and author of the book, “The Colorado Gardener’s Companion: An Insider’s Guide to Gardening in the Centennial State.” Her garden writing is published on gardening websites, in national gardening magazines and regional publications. You can find more of Jodi’s writing on her blog at WesternGardeners.com, VegetableGardener.com and on Twitter @WesternGardener.

I grew up in a mid-size city in Colorado with a mom who had too many things going on inside the house to be worried about the landscape outside the house. She didn’t plant flowers. We didn’t have a vegetable garden. There were no colorful containers overflowing with petunias. As long as the lawn got watered and mowed on a fairly regular basis, she was happy with her gardening efforts.

So it’s no surprise I was captivated by the one flowering plant in our yard — a beautiful red climbing rose. Every year that rose grew on its own. It wasn’t lovingly pruned and it certainly wasn’t babied with any special soils or rose fertilizers. It wasn’t protected from freezing temperatures with thick layers of mulch and there was no winter watering.

But every spring its canes would slowly turn from dry-brown to bright green and then little leaves would unfurl. By early summer it would be something fabulous to behold.

That’s why one of the first plants I added to the landscape at my new house was a climbing rose. I looked long and hard to find one with qualities similar to that red climber I remember so well.

That’s how the Rose Monster came to be.

The Rose Monster’s formal name is Rosa ‘John Cabot,’ a Canadian Explorer Series Hybrid Climber I found online at High Country Gardens. It arrived as two eight-inch tall stems and I planted them on each side of an arched arbor and let them grow.

The Rose Monster is now so tall and strong it actually holds the arbor together. Every spring, after months of cold weather, I watch as the long and wildly arching canes turn green and I look for little leaves to sprout. The rose show begins in June when the Monster is covered with hundreds of double-deep fuschia-pink flowers.

The Rose Monster isn’t only beautiful, it’s fragrant, too. In early morning it’s pure joy to step onto the patio, stand under the arbor and revel in its sweet scent.

I’m not the only one who loves these roses. Circular snippets cut from the leaves are used by native cutter bees to line their cells and serve as baby blankets for young bees. Bumblebees get so drunk on the Rose Monster’s nectar they practically stumble from one flower to the next before they lazily fly away. I’ve even caught my dog carefully sticking his nose into a blossom for a few quick sniffs.

I look forward to enjoying this climbing rose’s beauty for many years and taking good care of it—just like my mom took care of hers.

— Jodi Torpey

Photo credit: Jodi Torpey

If you spend much time reading blogs about gardening, you know there are some great ones out there. And today is your (last) chance to vote for some of them to win a coveted Mouse & Trowel Award. Also known as “the Mousies,” the Mouse & Trowel Awards honor garden bloggers in several different categories including Best Blog Design, Best Photography and Best Writing. Anybody can vote, and final votes must be cast today, May 17.

So head on over to the site and cast your own ballot. While I’m not familiar with every blog on the list, reading through the finalists’ names gave me a chance to check out some great new (to me) gardening blogs. And a few favorites were already there (Western Gardeners, Get In the Garden and Tiny Farm Blog come to mind.)

Why not take a look at the finalists and cast your own vote?

This Saturday, May 22, has been declared “Take Your Children to the Park … and Leave Them There” Day by Lenore Skenazy, a mom and author of Free-Range Kids and owner of the blog of the same name. In the name of encouraging creativity and activity, Skenazy encourages parents of school-age children to let their children play in the park or roam the neighborhood, unsupervised. 

While the “holiday” has gotten some media attention from outlets such as the New York TImes, it’s not surprisingly controversial in mommy circles. (Just read some of the comments on the NYT piece.)

My kids are only five and three, and there’s no way I’ll be leaving them in the park unsupervised. But I don’t think that means I’m limiting their creativity in any way. Actually, I’m usually chatting with another mom friend on the sidelines while the kids roam and play. On a recent trip to the park with Little Boy and another three-year-old friend, the other mom and I overheard the boys building a “clubhouse” and making bows and arrows out of sticks and rocks. None of this imaginary play was directed by us; we were busy chatting.

So while I may not agree that the important thing is sending kids out on their own, sans adult supervision, I wholeheartedly agree to going to the park (or the backyard, or the forest, or the garden) is a valuable, even vital, thing to do with your kids. And I hope you’ll join other moms across the country on Saturday as we encourage our kids to get outside and roam.

What do you think about free-range kids? Is it ok to send kids out unsupervised? Will you and/or your kids  join the movement in getting outside on May 22?

The second gardening project to be featured in my occasional series, “Gardens Doing Good,” is more high-profile than the first, mainly because some recognizable celebrity names are attached to it. And that’s fabulous.

Led by environmental activist Kelly Meyer with big-name partners such as Gabrielle Reece and Tobey Maguire, the Teaching Garden project launched last month with a goal of planting more than 1,000 school gardens in the next two years.

“The Teaching Garden encompasses a core belief that when you educate a child about nutritional choices, that child will teach his or her family and ultimately pass that knowledge on to others,” Meyer writes in her Huffington Post blog. “We set out a simple task: grow an organic garden, support it with a nutrition curriculum, enhance it with education about the importance of physical fitness, and challenge each student to make small changes to improve their health. Finally, each Teaching Garden school makes a commitment to pass on their knowledge and passion for a healthy lifestyle to the next Teaching Garden school.”

Meyer says she was inspired by her own children’s dismal school lunch experiences, along with First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, to start the initiative. With two school gardens planted so far and plenty of media attention, the Teaching Garden is destined for success. And that’s great news for thousands of school children who will get the opportunity to grow their own food, learn about where food comes from, and make healthier nutrition choices.

Do you know a “garden doing good” that should be featured here? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Please leave a comment below or email me at nancy (at) nancyjackson.com.

For the remaining Fridays in the WordCount Blogathon, I’m republishing some popular posts from the past. This one originally appeared in September 2009.

Our Big Boy was sent home early from preschool one day last week. He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t biting other kids. He just couldn’t stop scratching. He’d clawed his arms and legs to the point of drawing blood in some places. What I’d thought were a few bug bites that morning turned out to be a full-fledged reaction to poison ivy. (Bad mom. Ouch.)

We’re not sure where Big Boy came into contact with the urushiol oil of the poison ivy plant. Maybe it was when he helped his dad and granddad clear some brush in a field the previous weekend. Maybe it was when he played in a hollowed tree with his cousins at the lake on Labor Day. Wherever the poison came from, it was potent. And it got everywhere: his back, his tummy, his bum, in between his fingers. For almost a week, Big Boy has scratched and squirmed and awakened in the night crying for more calamine spray and Benadryl.

It’s a sad sight. And he may end up with some ugly scars from the incessant scratching. Even as the bumps and blisters begin to fade, I still feel sympathy for him, along with a little parental guilt — shouldn’t I have checked inside that hollowed-out tree before allowing him to climb in? Shouldn’t I have made him wear long pants to clear brush? (Oh yeah, I did.)

Then again, a little poison ivy isn’t so bad. To get it, he had to be playing outside, which is Big Boy’s favorite thing to do. And poison ivy potential aside, I know that unstructured, creative outside play is good for his mind and his body. As I’ve noted before on this blog, today’s kids spend 50 percent less time outside than they did just 20 years ago, according to KaBOOM. And research from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that kids spend an average of six and a half hours each day on electronic media.

I’m thinking that if I had to choose between a squirmy, itchy, blistery boy with a day of fresh air, sunlight, dirt and exercise behind him, and a four-year-old couch potato with a dazed look in his eyes, I’d take the poison-ivy sufferer any day. Who knows? One day he may see those three-pronged leaves and feel a rush of nostalgia for his playful boyhood.

But I think we need to prune the brush around our back fence, just in case.

Photo credit: 123rf.com

Most kids would give anything to have a sprawling tree house of their own in the backyard. But if they can’t, the next best thing is to play in someone else’s tree house. At the Huntsville Botanical Garden, the Tremendous Treehouses exhibit is just the place for kids to adopt a tree house for a day.

A few weeks ago, our family visited the exhibit, and the 11 tree houses planted throughout the gardens really are tremendous. Handcrafted by various groups and individuals throughout the city, each tree house is interactive and one-of-a-kind.

Some of my boys’ favorites included slides coming down from the tops of the tree houses, or a cozy loft accessible via a ladder to the top of the house. One tree house included a sandbox outside and chalkboard walls inside, with plenty of chalk for visitors to leave their artwork behind. We spent an entire afternoon meandering through the gardens and stopping to play in each of the 11 tree houses.

Along the way, we got to experience the gardens, which include a vegetable garden, herb garden, dogwood trail, nature trail, and numerous flower gardens. There’s also a fabulous children’s garden with activities and water features, great for cooling off on a hot day.

We’ve visited other botanical gardens before, but we loved that the Huntsville garden, while beautiful, seemed less formal than most of the ones we’ve seen. In a word, it was accessible. Visitors are encouraged to walk on the grass and hike off the trails into the wooded areas, so there’s no need to worry about children “messing something up.” Wagons are provided to pull your lunch (or your child) through the gardens.

Our house is about an hour away from the garden, but we definitely plan to return before the tree houses are dismantled in September. In fact, we’re now members of the garden, so we can go back anytime we want (for free) and in a way, we can call the tree houses our own.

What fun garden places have you visited lately?

Starting today, “the Wednesday List” will appear here on Wednesdays. Each week, watch for a different list of helpful tips or ideas related to gardening, cooking fresh food, or enjoying nature with kids.

This week, it’s five foods that grow great in container gardens: 

1. Herbs. Almost any type of herb will grow well in a container, and it’s great fun to season your food with fresh herbs from your own pots. Good choices for starting out include basil, chives, mint, dill, parsley, oregano and rosemary.

2. Tomatoes. Most types of tomatoes grow well in containers, and miniature varieties do especially well. Just remember to keep your soil moist at all times, rather than letting it dry out and then watering again.

3. Strawberries. I haven’t done it myself, but I’ve been told that strawberries grow well in containers — there’s even a pot named for them! And there’s nothing like picking your own strawberries and eating them fresh.

4. Lettuces. A friend of a friend grew a yummy “salad garden” in a giant container, full of different types of lettuce. She said the lettuces yielded for months, and she loved going out to the patio each afternoon to pull some lettuce for her supper salad.

5. Peppers. From jalapenos to regular old bells, peppers can thrive in a container garden. And they offer plenty of health benefits too.

What other foods do you like to grow in containers?

I’ve written regularly on this blog about the good things that result from kids spending time in a garden. But too much of anything can be bad, and a stinging report released last week from Human Rights Watch shows that hundreds of thousands of children in the United States are exposed to health risks and exploitation through their work on American farms.

Based on the report, children working in agriculture have few of the same legal protections of children working in any other type of work. That’s because the child labor laws were drafted in the 1930s, when most children working on farms were simply helping their parents on the family farm. Today, the circumstances are much different: For instance, it’s perfectly legal for children ages 12 and up to work unlimited hours before and after school. (For other jobs, children must be 14 or 15 and are limited to working three hours per day while school is in session.) Child farm workers drop out of school at four times the average rate. And children are also allowed to undertake hazardous farm work at age 16, when hazardous work in other career fields isn’t allowed until age 18.

Hear from some of the young farm workers and learn more about the problem from this video from Human Rights Watch:

The good news is that a new bill, the CARE Act, introduced by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), would amend the current child labor laws, increasing penalties for violations and requiring the U.S. Labor Department to better record data on the number of child workers and injuries. Of course, most of the children working long farm hours are doing so because their parents are also farm workers and are unable to make a living wage to support the whole family — and providing workers with a living wage is another whole subject.

However, as a mother and an advocate for farming, it makes me sad to learn more about the conditions of the children who may have picked the blueberries or spinach I’m feeding my own kids. If you agree that the status quo is unacceptable, consider contacting your Congressional representatives and encouraging them to pass the CARE Act.

What do you think? Should children in America be allowed to work in the fields for long hours for low wages?