Getting Our Hands Dirty in the Garden
I’m not a huge gardener and many of my gardens have struggled to do well due to my lack of dedication! But, we are currently growing sweet potatoes and some other veggies and, Lord willing, they survive! Haha.
Getting our hands dirty in the garden is life-giving no matter our age. However, it’s especially impactful for kids! The experience is an awesome opportunity to learn about agriculture and a cool way to encourage curiosity for healthy eating. Gardening can be a fun thing to do together too; getting our hands in the dirt and seeing worms in action is so rad!
As a family, we really focus on eating healthy and making sure that we put good food into our body. I feel so much better when I eat fresh, wholesome foods rather than processed foods with ingredients that can’t be pronounced. (Check out some of my recipes with home-grown food in the recipes section of my blog!)
The boys are learning to appreciate the growing of food too! They’ve taken ownership of watering them and paying attention to when it rains!
We are together learning about the different stages of a plant – from seed to maturity – in addition to light, water, and soil requirements. Other learning lessons come from the health benefits of the food they’re growing and the role each plant plays in the ecosystem. It’s so important that they have an understanding of agriculture and what it takes to bring food to our table.
Children benefit so much when they develop a palate for clean, fresh eating at an early age.
But as you moms out there know, children don’t always want to eat healthy! I think it’s primarily because we have junk food around and so they may get addicted and have pallet preferences to that. I recommend slowly stop buying that and instead replacing it with more nutritious real foods. It can be a struggle sometimes, so I like to invite my boys to sometimes be involved in making our food or even picking out what we make for our meal! Finding food we all like is a journey but with focus it can be done! Also we include talking about nutrition to help them understand health!
Watching a plant grow from seed is still fascinating to me. As we work to nurture the little plants, we are reminded of the wonder of God’s creation. It is so rewarding as a parent to see my children marvel at God’s handiwork and watch their faith grow through it all. Getting our hands dirty is so refreshing! Youtube has great resources if you want to start a small garden!
Happy growing!
