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Let me tell you about my success
in teaching my children, and then my grandchildren, how to be
excellent gardeners while they are having fun, thinking they
are playing! First I’ll describe a book that really did
it for my daughter, and then I’ll tell you about a new CD
ROM that is unique and wonderful as a tool to teach truly valuable
gardening knowledge while the kids are having fun “playing”
on the computer.
I enjoy gardening, and our family
loves the fruits of our labors, but I just couldn’t get
our children interested in the garden! It looked too much like
work to them and they avoided it. Then one March day when our
youngest daughter Heather was 8 years old, I discovered a book
called Grow-Box Gardens, by J. R. Mittleider. This great little
book was full of easy to follow graphical illustrations and practical
advice, giving step-by-step instructions on how to create and
grow a beautiful and highly productive garden of any size, in
any yard, in any climate. The garden could even be on a patio,
a deck, a driveway, or even on a flat roof.
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This was exciting, and I sat
down with Heather to create a Grow-Box garden. Suddenly it was
her garden! And we worked together over the next two months building
a beautiful garden, with a semi-automatic watering system for
easy care. The boxes, 18” X 12’, were filled with sawdust
and sand, and we planted seeds and some seedlings from the nursery.
This was fun. But the best part was yet to come!
Business took me away from home
a great deal during that summer, but the garden produced more
than we had ever had before - and Heather cared for the garden
virtually all by herself, watering and feeding on schedule, and
her mother only helped her pick the vegi’s. |
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Of course there was no weeding at
all, because of the Grow-Boxes, which Heather loved. We used
those same Grow-Boxes for several years after that with great
results every year, and I highly recommend them for small yards
or on rocky or toxic ground.
Then I graduated to a much bigger
½ acre garden, which is all in the soil. But I still use
the Mittleider methods with tremendous success. My garden is
visible from Utah’s Hogle Zoo, and thousands of people stop
to admire and eat the vegetables we toss to them. But this time
around I’m trying to get grandchildren interested in gardening,
and I recently discovered something even better than the Grow-Box
Garden book.
It’s called The Garden Master
CD, and it has three different things on it that individually
or together are sure to appeal to children of all ages and dispositions.
Two books, again by Dr. J. R. Mittleider, are terrific. They
both have been edited and arranged by Ph.D. educators with extraordinary
talents. The first, 6 Steps to Successful Gardening, is very
simple and has some fun recipes that many children will enjoy
preparing. The other, The Mittleider Gardening Course, is the
student manual used worldwide in teaching by Dr. M.
But the really exciting find
here is the Garden Designer program. Dr. Ron Guymon, another
outstanding talent, created this over the past 3 years, at a
cost of about $100,000. He has spent many years developing materials
to teach children, and has several things published, but this
is by far my favorite.
The person begins by typing in
their name (the garden is thus “Tommy’s” garden).
Then they answer simple questions about the garden they want
to create - such as where they live, the size area they have,
and what they want to grow. The program then creates the garden
for them; all laid out in rows, with everything just where it
should be planted. Instructions for when to plant, when to water
and feed, and when to harvest are given for every vegetable they
named. And there’s even a calendar, showing every day -
from planting the first item to harvesting the last crop, with
instructions for what’s to be done in the garden that day.
It’s fun for the kids to
do the planning and creating, with any number of what-if changes
and even multiple gardens, and they can print the instructions
and calendar, and be assured they will have a great garden -
just by following the simple instructions that are all laid out
for them and the whole thing is so inexpensive! |
