Click here to view "Springtime Gardening" from Studio4kids.tv
This is a great little video to interest your little sprout in helping you in the garden. I'd love to tell you that mine get out there and help me every year, but that wouldn't be true. What I can tell you is that my 13 year old will be weeding at least once a week for the next few months at a rate of $5.00 a bucket. The buckets take about an hour to fill so we thought that was fair... although I seem to remember doing it for free... and not just for an hour.
Well what can I say, I just can't carry off a threat the way my dad did.
It's not spring yet, but here in Texas, it feels like it. Our last freeze day is coming up soon and I got out there to clean up the garden and prepare the bed today. Every year I have great hopes of having a tremendous garden that will supply us with unlimited veggies and some fruit. Well- I have a garden and we do have some wonderfully fresh fruits and veggies, but never as many as I would like.
Once I had hopes of interesting my kids in gardening, but they would rather do other things. I blame it on hot Texas' summers. The first year I started my vegetable garden it was consistently 106 degrees in the afternoon. The mornings were also hot, humid, and buggy. The little ones face (she was about 2) would turn bright red in just a few minutes of being outside. When I sent her in to cool off, I would send the older one in to keep an eye on her. They would never come back out. At some point I would realize they had been gone a long time and go in to chase them out. It was even hotter now. You can guess how long that lasted. I finally gave up and resigned myself to the fact that the garden was mine and mine alone. (Maybe if I had started earlier showing them these videos they would be avid gardeners now....?)
One nice thing about not having them in the garden is that I can plug in my radio/CD player and play whatever I want while I'm working in the garden. At 13 and 20 our tastes in music are hardly the same. Today I put on a CD from the back of a guitar and fiddle music book and played instrumentals of Bluegrass and Irish tunes. In my opinion there is nothing finer to work in the garden to. And if the neighbors don't like it... well, it's better than listening to a leaf blower at 7:30 a.m., the lawn mower at 8, or that darn dog across the canyon any time!
The bluegrass band was playing some rendition of "Old Joe Clark" when I realized that a nearby mocking bird was trying to sing along! I kid you not. He did a 3 note riff that fit in beautifully with "fare thee well, Old Joe Clark"-the "old Joe Clark" part -and he did it repeatedly.
Now mocking birds can be annoying. They do tend to chase away other song birds and we always joke about one that lived near our house in New Braunfels. We called him psychotic because he sang about 22 different calls including a tree frog, a squeaky gate, and a single door alarm. He did it very early in the morning and drove us crazy too.
My husband hates mocking birds even though they are the state bird. He calls them the "neighborhood nuisance", "flying pest " and other names I won't write, but I have to say that any bird that enjoys Bluegrass music and sings along (in tune, no less), is alright with me!
I listened to him until the song's finish. The next tune was a lot more complicated with some fancy fiddling. I guess he figured he was out-done, because then he flew off.
Now tell me your little ones and even your big ones wouldn't have enjoyed that spring-time duet. And if I hadn't been in the garden, I would have missed it.
Get your little ones to help you in the garden when they are little and it's still a nice temperature & you'll stand a better chance of getting them to help when they are older Vegetables go down easier at dinner if they have helped to grow & harvest them, too.
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Happy Planting,
Barb