Growing Up Green

“Dot, what are we doing that for?”

“Dot, why do we need to make the fuzzy white stuff on the pumpkin leaves go away? Can I spray the milk on their leaves?”

“Dot, how long do we need to do it for? When we get through doing this, will we ever do it again?”

A teacher pipes up from across the garden, “Evan, wait for Dot to answer the first question before you ask another one.”

 “Dot doesn’t mind. She always answers them,” Evan replies, and he starts right in again with his questions.

When I was approached about working on a children’s gardening project in the summer of 2002, I tackled the task by looking back into my own childhood.

I grew up on a vegetable farm, so gardening was integrated into the fabric of daily life. I asked myself how I learned what I know and soon realized the truth of the old adage “we learn by example.” A lot of what I learned came from countless hours just watching a loved adult do a job, while we talked about something entirely unrelated.

“Nana, Peter isn’t sharing the wheelbarrow. What are you doing?”

Nana, who was always doing something that needed to be done, answered my question without stopping her chore. “Tell your brother I said to share with you. I am thinning the radishes. If we leave them too close together they won’t get nice fat radishes on them.”
 
Of course, it would take two or three visits back to Nana to make Peter share the wheelbarrow, and in that time I continued to ask questions and watch what she was doing.

At some point, I’d try thinning radishes, or whatever task was at hand, and, voila! I could do it myself!

On a family farm, all members are needed to get things done. Just being with adults I loved and joining their activities at what ever level I could manage gave me a great sense of accomplishment, a feeling of being a part of something important.

It didn’t matter what the job was, I was recognized and made to feel as though I’d made a difference. For example, when I was little, I was notorious for squishing the strawberries when I picked them. Although I hated that I was taking so long to learn to do it “right,” I always knew those squished berries were important.

How? I would bring them to my grandmother, who would turn them into jam. When I arrived with the squished berries, she’d put both hands on her cheeks and exclaim in Italian, “How special these are! I know how much love is in each one.”

Growing up on the farm, I loved the sizes, shapes, colors, textures, and smells of the natural world. I loved hiding in the corn, looking at stuff under rocks and boards, building fairy houses out of sticks and stones, having tomato fights with my siblings, and making figurines out of corn husks that I dyed with plant juices.

Statistics tell us that 90 percent of the 43 million elementary school children in the United States, are two or three generations removed from the farm. How will our children develop an appreciation for the natural world if they have no memories of it? How will they make sound decisions about our natural resources? Why should they care about nature if they don’t love it?

Plant-based education is a way to change this situation.

In the summer of 2000, the ”Growing a Green Generation” project got underway as a collaboration among three UNH units: Cooperative Extension, the Plant Biology Department and the Child Study and Development Center (CSDC). Our goal: to develop a curriculum that any caregiver, teacher, or parent can use, regardless of their level of horticultural experience.

The CSDC involves UNH undergraduates studying early childhood education, so this project focused on the question, “What can young children learn down a garden path?

We’ve learned together that children can learn to read, write, and communicate down a garden path. They can hone their gross and fine motor skills. They can have positive interactions with their peers and the adults around them. They can observe—and even consume—their natural surroundings through touch, hearing, smell, taste, and sight. They can experience joy in their environment by letting the juice of a ripe tomato run down their chins, and by sitting in the shade of a sunflower house or a bean teepee. And when the world is going too fast, a garden can offer solitude.

Human development experts tell us the most lasting lessons are learned in the first five years of life. I have no doubt that my early experiences on the farm “grew me up green” and enabled me to raise my own children green. I hope the body of gardening activities provided in our “Growing a Green Generation” curriculum will foster in other children the same fond, lasting, positive connection to the natural world. Look for “Growing a Green Generation” at the UNH Sustainable Horticulture Web site.

By Dot Perkins, UNH Agricultural Program Coordinator