Have you noticed that kids get outside less now than when we were growing up? I remember days spent outside, socializing with friends and neighbors, and it seems like such a stark contrast to what I see today. As a society, we tend to be guarded, especially with our children. We also spend quite a bit of time tuned into the digital world, so it doesn’t come as much surprise that we are staying in our own cozy nests and becoming less social in a face-to-face manner. Our circumstances are what they are right now and I don’t see them changing anytime soon, but there has to be a way to get our kids to have some of the quality outdoor time and the accompanying social interactions that we remember fondly from our own childhoods.
Last year around this time, my husband and I read something about front yard vegetable gardens and the movement to grow food, not lawns. It seemed worthy of further research and after joining a bunch of facebook gardening groups, we decided to give it a go. At the very least, it would get us outside more and it would give our kids something low-tech to be excited about for two to three seasons of the year. At best, it would produce a lot of food for us, saving on grocery expenses and allowing us to plan healthy meals more creatively, centered around whatever was freshly harvested.
In the early springtime, my husband built some hefty raised beds in our front yard and we planned out an organic garden, with enough room to accommodate our favorite Spring, Summer, and Fall vegetables and herbs. We planted most of our garden by seed and bought a few seedlings from a local organic farm, to fill out the remainder of the vegetables that we wanted to grow. He covered the beds in PVC pipe hoops and then plastic sheets, to act as a greenhouse in the first few months of the season when the ground temperature was not yet quite seasonal for growing. It was an ambitious undertaking, to put it mildly.
Every day of the growing season, we were outside watering, weeding, planting more, fertilizing, checking for bugs and disease, and eventually, we were harvesting, too. Because our kids were so young and couldn’t be left alone inside, they came outside with us to watch and help with tending the garden. We had our three year old involved in every step of the process and she loved learning about our pollinators hands-on and tasting our fresh snap peas and rosemary. Our baby was out in the front yard, rolling around on a blanket and snacking on anything his big sister brought over to him.
While I’m still amazed at the amount of food we produced for ourselves and our local family members and neighbors, I still think the best part of it was that it all happened right in our front yard, in public view. It was such a great way to get to meet and get to know some of our neighbors, who might have otherwise just walked by our house, had we been doing this in our backyard. Instead, our daughter would wave hello and run over to the edge of the yard to let a passerby know that her favorite color was pink, her brother had just learned to crawl, and that she was going to be turning four in a few months. People stopped to talk and inquire about what we were growing. Even the people who were attempting to listen to some music while on a walk around the neighborhood would take their earbuds out to stop and chat for a bit. It was great for everyone, not just for the people in my house, but also for our neighbors who were genuinely interested in learning more about our garden and getting to know our family, too.
I’m really glad we did this when we did because now our kids will have some sort of expectation that this is what the warm season looks like in our house. They will hopefully remember long summer days spent outside, working with their hands, getting to know their surroundings, and socializing in a way that will benefit them for years to come. Now that spring is approaching, I’m very much looking forward to ditching our hibernation pattern of winter and getting out to spend time with our neighbors again.
