Making Gardening Fun at Every Stage for the Younger Age

by Sarah Hinckley, Executive Director, Mount Desert Nursery School

As robins sucked up worms like spaghetti noodles from our lawn this spring, backhoes and dump trucks moved mounds of dark, fertile earth around our garden beds. Powered by small hands with matching sized feet often stripped bare to burrow in the dirt, this was how we prepared our beds for planting.

Over the last three seasons of cultivating a garden with the students of Mount Desert Nursery School in Northeast Harbor, I have learned many things but most importantly, to make it fun at every stage.

As a preschool teacher, one of my favorite things to watch is my students enjoy the fresh produce from our garden. From the first pea pods fat with sweetness eaten straight off the vine to freshly baked french fries made from potatoes dug up the day before; the excitement of what is made by Mother Nature never gets old. A month or so before the robins arrived, each student chose a seed to plant in a cup that could sit on a warm window sill. This Fall, we are looking forward to starting seeds in our new solar-powered greenhouse as soon as we put our outside garden to bed. Each day the students checked on their seeds that were working so hard to pop through the dirt. Shouts and lots of finger pointing happened on the day each of them discovered their plant had made it through its first stage.

Showering the new shoot with water from our recycled water bottles that had several pinholes in the lid became the new exciting phase of farming. Most of those plants only got to about 3-inches tall before falling victim to the eager overwatering of 3 and 4-year-olds.

As the inside experiment wrapped up, outside our garden was calling for attention and new seeds. One of the things adults like to do before planting for the season is to get the garden perfectly prepared with layers of compost and clean soil. What is important to remember is not all seeds need perfection to come to life and neither do preschool children. For many, each stage prompts questions and sparks curiosity about bugs, worms, water and food.

After prepping one part of the garden with a fence for peas to climb and freshly enhanced soil, the area sat and waited for the ‘right time’ to plant. At least 3 weeks past the ‘right time’, a teacher gave each student pea seeds and told them to poke them into the dirt.

Some floated to the surface with Spring rains, others looked as though they may have been carried away by hungry birds. It was difficult to tell if there would be any peas to pick in the next two months until a perfect line of green shoots popped up about 10 days after planting. More shouting and pointing ensued.

While the peas were coming to life in our front garden bed, the back garden bed, where backhoes and shovels had prepped the soil, voluntary potato shoots popped through. They were remnants from a fall dig for potatoes that could only be compared to a treasure hunt for our young, enthusiastic farmers.

Peas and voluntary plants sparked the need to fill the remaining space in our two garden beds. As I shopped for seedlings and strategized about their location, I began to notice small volunteer tomato plants sprinkled near the pea shoots. It seemed like a good location for the seedlings I had purchased. Sooner than later, with consistent watering, the volunteer tomato plants had caught up to our seedlings. Students and teachers alike were dwarfed by the robust tomato plants that soon took over the entire garden space.

While admiring the tomato plants we were surprised to have pumpkin vines aggressively push through cages and pathways from the back of both garden beds. There are now three pumpkins the children check on each day to see how their color has changed from green to orange. Spiders spin webs, fuzzy caterpillars crawl about and leopard slugs make their way through our playground. Today our students learned slugs don’t have ears like them after calling out for one they met yesterday to see if it would come back.

Each year is an experiment when it comes to introducing fresh garden food to preschool children. Our students love to pick the tomatoes and each has subsequently spit the half-eaten fruit onto the ground. I fear there may be many volunteer plants on our playground in the spring. Some of the students are so enthusiastic for what comes from the garden they will eat basil leaves raw after consuming several pea pods. None of them seemed interested in fresh zucchini sticks when our first ones were ready to be picked. Instead, we served zucchini muffins for morning snack to many more smiles.

As any seasoned gardener knows, each year is a new experiment and can bring many new discoveries. When gardening with children, those discoveries can be the spark that continues to make them good stewards of the earth and inspires teachers to want to do it over and over again.