Children are gardeners at heart.  They love to play in the dirt, tend to little plants, and taste the fruits of their labors.  Children often come to like vegetables they previously despised once they have grown them.  Children have an enthusiasm that is infectious if we let it take its own shape.   Everything that needs to be done in a garden can easily be adapted to be done by children.   And yet this natural activity depends greatly on how parents participate. 

What follows are some tips for parents to help them and their children have the most enriching and rewarding experience in the garden.  Remember that the journey is more important than the end result. 

· Take it one step at a time, explain things clearly and simply, and the experience will pull you along.

· Children will enjoy certain tasks, more than others so watch for these.  Remember to let them find joy in what they are passionate about and don’t try to push your interests on them.  Keep children involved in every aspect of the garden, this can help keep their interest up.  If you only allow them to collect the peas and do nothing else, you are going to lose them.  Help them to understand every aspect of the garden. Let them do what they find joy in, observe what they take pride in.

· Have children take charge of certain crops of the garden, or parts of the garden (i.e. watering, or weeding…)

· Allow children to snack in the garden, let them taste what they are growing. 

· Mix work with playtime.  Keep the experience fun.  If the tone is overly serious or that gardening is a burden, then that is what gardening will become for them.  We will lose more green thumbs on the planet because of that.  So keep it fun, help make it fun, be spontaneous, and let the child out of you.  The whole experience will be much more of an organic experience.  Balance is the key, because sometimes things just need to be done.  It is also not just a playground.

· Allow for mistakes to happen, because they will happen.  Keep light-hearted about things and everyone's experience will be better for it.   But are they really mistakes or something that we can all learn from as we grow in life?  If we learn from them, then they become lessons. 

· Teach children that the garden is a natural community (ecosystem) that you are creating.  Teach about the earths natural cycles -- water, nutrients, life, moon, seasons, day and night.  Be creative.  Look at how nature is working around you and look for a similar pattern in the garden (i.e. leaves covering a forest floor, mulch in a garden -- both keep moisture in the soil, regulates soil temperature, keep undergrowth down….) 

· Use only natural fertilizers and organic methods in the garden.  This is important for both the health of children and the earth.  It teaches stewardship.  Also, children eat more food than adults for their body weight.  Thus they tend to concentrate toxins more than we do. 

· The garden is a learning laboratory with lots of opportunities to experiment and observe nature.  You can experiment with mulching half a crop of plants, and leaving half unmulched.  See how the plants perform.  Did they grow larger?  Which one showed that it had water stress?  Which half had fewer weeds, which half took longer to weed…? The experiments and observations are endless.  Teach them never to be satisfied by just scratching the surface. 

· There is not just one way to garden.  Everyone has a little different situation, so find your own approach.  Remember there is no right way!

· Get down on the kids level, and match their excitement.  If they get down on their knees to look at something, get down lower and get more excited than them.  They will try to match yours.  Resist the tendency to stand back as adults tend to do.  Dive in, help them see that life is an adventure, no matter what you are doing or looking at.  Pull them in deeper to what they are looking at. You don’t have to know anything about it; you just need to be able to ask questions.  And this will help them become students of life, to live adventurously… to find mystery, and to learn from all things.