Gardening with Baby

I wrote this over three years ago - my baby girl is now four-and-a-half. But I like the essay so I thought I'd post it here for all you gardening mamas.


Though the days still float warm and sunny, the nights are cooling. Last week I consolidated some potted basil plants into one pot and brought them inside to over winter. I then let my twelve-month-old daughter go at it with the now plant-free pot I left outside, still half full of potting soil. This dark fluffy soil was more exciting to her than the chocolate cupcake we shared on her first birthday. She plopped both hands into the soil with a joyful yell: Dirt! Dirt all for me! I continued cleaning up the fall beds, weeding and mulching the kale, leeks, and radishes. When I turned to check on her, I found my daughter happily sitting in the fourteen-inch pot, dirt sprinkled atop her fuzzy head.

My little sprout loves the garden as much as I. We spend hours working and playing together outside, though frequently our goals conflict some. I would prefer my tomatoes to ripen, for instance, while one of her favorite pastimes is to sit next to the jungle of tomatillos and tomatoes, picking green fruits. She takes one bite, chatters at the hard orb like a squirrel, and tosses it into the mulch. This could go on for hours, I suspect. To save a few tomatoes, I relocate her to a shady patch of grass with some plastic pots to play with. She is happy for a while, but after not too long I see her monkey-crawling on hands and feet over to the pumpkin vine, where she likes to pat and scratch at the beautiful orange globe. Or sitting in the middle of the lettuce patch, babbling away and harvesting very baby carrots. Or perhaps plucking the irresistibly bright red heads off the geraniums.

With her help, the hoard of squirrels who share this land with us, and the short high-altitude season, I have not harvested quite as much this year from the garden as I would have liked. We have lived in this house just over a year, and the yard had been sorely neglected before we came, so I have worked hard to improve soil fertility and keep noxious weeds at bay. Every zucchini and carrot that makes it to maturity is worth a celebration; I got none of the strawberries, and out of six vines, only one pumpkin. In truth, though, I don’t mind. It has been a year of growing things other than food, including patience, a child who loves the earth, and a garden of exploration and discovery.

Many have said I was crazy to take on so much in the garden while learning to be a new mom, while caring for a babe. The garden, though, has kept me sane. When I don’t have soil to sink my hands into and a compost pile to tend, that is when I feel a little crazy. And it is here in the garden that my daughter seems to be happiest as well. She does not yet understand the connection between the plants and our food, but she knows the power of the land. When she was a week old, I removed her swaddle and tiny onesie and laid her on the grass. She relaxed into the Earth in the same way she would mold herself to my own body.

Now, a year later, she is almost walking. I ask her if she wants to go outside, and she speed crawls for the back door with a yelp of delight. I used to have to fish grass and wood chips out of her mouth. Then I had to make sure the tomatoes she picked were too large to pose a choking hazard. Gradually I have been able to let her play by herself for ten minutes or more at a time, always keeping an eye on her while I do other garden tasks. It has meant, though, letting go. I’ve had to let go of the baby pumpkin she picked early, and of her clean clothes when she scaled the compost pile. To release the idea of a perfect urban garden, because I have chosen to stay home with her rather than work, and money is scarce. I’ve had to let go, too, of always being busy or productive, and have taken time to just sit and watch her sweet little self as she dumps dirt or mulch over her head with a toothy grin. So while she chomps on green fruit and uproots flowers, I am happy, for she will be my baby only once, and I am growing a child who loves the Earth. To me, there is no greater harvest.

The School Garden Movement: Farcical Fad or Fabulous Foundation

Caitlin Flanagan's Atlantic article argues that school gardens are robbing students of a "real" education, especially immigrant students whose parents work the fields. She writes, "The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt)." Blogger Ed Bruske and others have already provided fantastic arguments against Flanagan's essay, but I wanted to add a few points from my own homeschooling, intuitive gardening perspective.

It's not just science, writing and math that kids learn from the garden. It's not just that their whole regard for their bodies' and where food comes from improves. Or that they learn about the positives of diversity and how to overcome hardship by working together. People who garden, kids or adults, in schools or at home, are more grounded people. Which is to say they entrain with the energy of the garden. Though they probably don't know it, they spend time working with nature spirits. They learn about seasons and dirt and weather, not just from books but through their bodies.

Kids who DO things instead of just learning about them truly learn things, and more importantly they build the foundations for higher learning, as in the Benezet study in the 1930's that found that children learned math better if they weren't given formal math training until 7th grade. Their education focused on the ability to think, read, and discuss their thoughts with others (what Benezet called "read, reason and recite"). These kids who weren't taught rote math were then able to pick up higher math concepts very quickly when older - much more quickly than those with "formal" training in long division and fractions.

That is what kids in gardens are learning. They learn to communicate with each other and with the land. They learn about self efficacy. They learn to learn. And perhaps they also learn that the hard work their parents do or did in the fields is of value, that poverty doesn't come from dirt under your fingers (or pesticides in your lungs) but compartmentalizing classicism that separates "learning" from "doing" and values reading over real relationship with the earth.

Tree Poems

I'm working on an article about planting an apple tree over my daughter's placenta, and came across a lovely collection of tree poems from a website dedicated to the Spirit of Trees.






(From the website:)

Many tree-related online resources focus on the scientific aspects of trees or describe simple tree-planting procedures. Spirit of Trees offers a complementary approach, one that highlights the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of trees. You will find, in particular, an extensive collection of multicultural folktales from contemporary storytellers, with links to more tales on the web. When told with feeling, these have the power to foster a heart felt connection to trees, one that taps deep into the human imagination to inspire hope, wonder and compassion for the living earth.

There is also a selection of poetry, plus other sections for lesson plans, for scholarly essays, and for national and international tree organizations — and more.

...
Cristy West
Editor and Program Coordinator

Here is one of the poems for you:

A Blessing for the Woods

by Michael S. Glaser

Before I leave, almost without noticing,
before I cross the road and head toward
what I have intentionally postponed—

Let me stop to say a blessing for these woods:
for crows barking and squirrels scampering,
for trees and fungus and multi-colored leaves,

for the way sunlight laces with shadows
through each branch and leaf of tree,
for these paths that take me in,
for these paths that lead me out.