The Merit and Joy of Preschool Gardening

In November of 2009, I fell into coordinating a preschool garden when the then coordinator had to step back for reasons of familial health. Almost a year and a half later, I am a convert, a true and firm believer, in the merit, value, and worth of gardening in preschools. Not to mention a recipient of the joy of it.

When I begin working at the preschool garden, I hadn’t spent a ton of time with preschool age kids, or done a ton of gardening, or a ton of coordinating of school or community gardens. I would scramble to come up with activities to do with the kids; something engaging for little ones but also productive for our garden. We started peas, transplanted all sorts of greens, weeded, sowed radish seeds, harvested tomatoes and brought them to the cook.

As I’ve become more comfortable with the little ones, though, and with the rhythms and realities of gardening, the nature of our preschool gardening has changed. We play more now. We dance and sing and use our imagination and laugh a whole lot. And what used to be our work – planting, weeding, harvesting – continues but has grown increasingly playful. The whole thing – the playing, the working, the eating – has become one thing – exploring.

Encouraging exploration and creating a safe, joyful, and engaging space for it to happen, is what preschool gardening is all about. And what gardening at any age should really be about. Exploring this magical world we live in, in all it colors and contradictions and deliciousness and smells and interconnectedness, and exploring our own relationship to that world.

These pictures are from a day when we played a game where the leader would put on this green vest and use the magical deer horn to find different colors in the garden (purple, orange, red, blue, white…) and the rest of us followed with our garden spinoculars made out of painted toilet paper tubes on a piece of yarn around our necks and looked at the things the leader found, or anything that caught our fancy.

I’ve watched as kids get soooo excited about broccoli and spinach, and care for a plant as it grows from a seed to a radish they can eat, and learn to treat other creatures gently. And I’ve seen as their parents learn, too. As one mother repeats over and over in delighted astonishment that she didn’t know that, when I tell her about how fruit comes from flowers. Or as the parents learn what a pea looks like growing, or that broccoli doesn’t have to look like the big compact head you buy at the grocery store, that you can eat leggy florets, too, and that their kids love to do so.

And I’ve heard as the parents tell me how their kids ask for more vegetables at home now, and how they try and plant seeds in the dirt on the side of the road.

Getting kids when they are this young, at the very beginning of their institutionalization, and impressing upon all of their senses the magic of this world, is a good time to start. It’s better than first grade. It’s better than sixth grade. It’s better than ninth grade. The earlier these kids can experience the flavors, the colors, the smells, the textures that really are life, the more they will be receptive to those experiences later on in life and want them. And if we can get their families involved at that young age, too, and make eating well something that doesn’t seem impossible but seems delightfully familiar, then we are golden.

Preschool gardens forever!