by Laura Lou

Created on: June 10, 2008

Green Thumbs, Brown Thumbs

Giving children the gift of a "green thumb" has to rank near the top of what you can do for those precious youngsters. All too often, a child's first experience with gardening is in schoola sad little bean seed planted in a half-pint milk carton using soil from the playground. It isn't going to live and flourish there! The child will not be harvesting beans for the family dinner, and you know that is what the child imagines. Even if the seed sprouts, it will probably die in the classroom over a weekend or vacation with no water. There is NOT enough room in a milk carton for roots to develop either, so watered or not, this bean seed is doomed.

Thus is born another "brown thumb". "I can't grow anything" the child internalizes. "It is MY fault". He won't see that everyone else's seed died, too. If the seeds were taken home and died there it is even worse. Then the child thinks he is the ONLY one whose bean died. The dream of heroically feeding the family dies.

I have seen more and more schools starting to develop real gardens on the school grounds. This is great! From Kindergarten to High School students can feel success if the teachers involved have the time and the funds to garden right. But what happens over the summer? Maybe a dedicated maintenance crew will see to watering, but you can't ask them to weed the garden, too. Maybe the involved teachers or a dedicated parent or two could visit over the vacation, but most of them scatter. So what is greeting the children in the fall when they return? Not the pretty successful garden they envisioned so hopefully last spring. The garden looks awful; all full of weeds and dead or under-developed plants. Maybe the individual child doesn't take on the fault as his own, but still, there was no success.

Now we have even more children convinced that they have "brown thumbs".

What can you do? You can do a lot! Even if your home garden is small, it is a great investment in the future to dedicate part of that garden to your children, neighborhood children, or grandchildren. It doesn't matter if it is a six-inch strip along a fence, or a large vegetable garden, make the garden the children's own.

Last year I had two "square-foot gardens" four feet by four feet. I lost the original book by Mel Bartholomew on "Square Foot Gardening" from back in the 60s-70s so I went to the Internet, found the website and ordered the new books. Even though my oldest granddaughter was only 4, she looked at the pictures with

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