It is the time of year when we start drawing up our list of New Years Resolutions. Adults do it, even if they know they will shatter everyone of them by the first week in January. Many of us will trot out the old familiar ones: Lose weight, save more money, quit wasting time, be a nicer person, and so on. If they sound familiar it’s because we have been making and creaking them for decades, Sometimes, The Olds ask children, “What are your New Years Resolutions?” Trust me, unless those young tax exemptions are trying to get on the good side of an adult, they are not going to say, “I’m going to eat more vegetables!”
When was the last time as a grown up you saw children fighting over who unfairly took too many green beans, or cry “DIBS” on the Brussels sprouts? Probably never, and it isn’t likely to happen until charcoal sprouts and battleships fly, either. However, I have just the ticket to fix this for decades to come.
A week or so ago I mentioned the imminent arrival of seed catalogues from various companies such as Burpees, Schleepers, and others. Contained within those slick pages is the top secret to getting children to eat their vegetables, and perhaps even like them so much that they’ll ask for seconds. After that, they might even help change the world.
All we have to do is sell them on the idea of making their own garden, give them a chance to choose a few packages of vegetable seeds, and let them get excited about having about the project. Just keep in mind that gardening is like writing: everyone wants to garden, everyone wants to have a garden, and most people do not want to do the actual gardening. Getting the kiddiwinks out there, next spring and summer, especially to weed, will be a challenge. You can get them to do it, just like Tom Sawyer got his friends to paint the fence.
The payoff for you is that no child can resist eating the vegetables they raised. They take pride in the produce, and even get a bit territorial over it. By next summer you will be the envy of the neighborhood when you tell your friends that your children constantly fight and squabble over who gets to finish off the vegetables they grew.
Just watch out because there is a chance, admittedly a thin one, that it might get out of hand. My father enticed me out to his garden one year and asked if I would plant the beets. I did. And I watered and weeded them. When the time came to migrate them from field to table those were MY beets, and only with considerable condescension did I let my sister have one. It was a small one, at that. The rest were mine – all mine, although I did share with The Olds. The next year my parents decided we had to have two rows of beets – one for the rest of the family, and one for me. The same thing was true about the sprouts, spinach, green peppers, and a few others.
The scheme to get children to eat their vegetables works because it appeals to our basic instincts of greed, selfishness, and the quest for status: “These are MY green beans, and no matter how bad they taste I am eating them and you can’t have any.”
I know we try to teach children to share and be generous, but I am fairly sure the rules can be bent when it comes to the serious business of eating fresh vegetables. After all, the time might come when they might prefer broccoli over a bowl of ice cream. But sometimes, an appeal to one’s pride, when in the right dose, leads to far greater good. It’s not likely, but it could happen, In this case, a child who likes their vegetables because they grew their own will go from being a young adult all the way to old geezerhood who will still be eating vegetables.
Those little packets of garden seeds lead to a lot more than a plate of vegetables later in the year. Children may fuss and complain about school being too hard or too boring, but when they are gardening they don’t even realize that they are receiving an education Earth Sciences, such as water, temperature, sunlight, soil conditions, Ph-Factors in the soil, insects and more. That is knowledge that they can take from their own little farm straight into the classroom and the rest of life.
Across the country, and in many other nations around the world, churches, libraries, and other organizations have established small garden plots and invited children to become urban farmers. Just as with the home gardens, they learn about planting, weeding, and raising some of their own food.
Not surprisingly, some of these groups are now taking it a step further by showing and teaching the children how to convert raw vegetables into a meal. For example, an Anglican church school in inner city Bristol, UK, works with children to plant tomatoes, onions, an assortment of lettuces, and herbs. Once in the kitchen, the children were invited to taste different raw lettuces. Some of them had never experienced arugula before.
After that, the teachers help the children how to recognize different herbs by sight and smell, and then showed how they could be chopped and added as a salad topping. A few herbs sure beats the two spices we had back in Minnesota – salt and pepper.
We are all smart enough to know that a child’s garden is not going to stop global warming, climate change, or clean our air. Still, it is a tiny step in the right direction. And this one, gardening and learning how to enjoy the produce, truly can have a tremendous benefit for children, their parents, and everyone’s health.