Grow Something: It’ll be Good for All of Us

Coming Back to Nature: Science-Rich Activities for Children and Their Adults

Note: This blog is a serialization of a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside.

Introduction

Please, please, please grow things with your kids! We think gardening is a critical skill for us humans. Every living being on the planet except many humans, particularly members of the modern industrial culture, know how to procure food. In addition, gardening ecologically is one of the main ways humans can establish mutually beneficial relationships within ecosystems. Such relationships are a primary feature of regenerative systems. Growing plants is regenerative for our physical, mental, and spiritual health and for our planet! This can be as easy as sprouting mung beans or as complicated as planting an edible food forest. In this post, we introduce some ways to get started with ecological gardening that we hope will open the door to a lifelong passion for obtaining a yield from your ecosystem while being a force in ecosystem regeneration.

Activities

One of many permaculture ideas that I love is to start small. Rather than running to the store to buy soil, seeds, and other gardening supplies, and starting a full-scale garden, we recommend gaining some experience forming relationships with plants in a small way as your first steps into gardening. The activities below are all ways to do that.

Adopt a Plant

Walk around your yard with your child(ren) and pick a plant to adopt. It can be a wildflower, herbaceous plant, so called weed (i.e., a plant growing where we don’t want it), or clump of grass. Ask your child to give it a name. You might want to place a stick into the soil next to it or build a border of rocks to mark the location of your new friend. You don’t need to do anything beyond this, but check in on it and watch its developmental progression. 

Sprout Beans

Sprouting beans is a fun way to nurture some seeds and obtain a yield. You can use store-bought dry beans with the caveat that beans from some bags may not sprout because they have been irradiated, otherwise treated, or stored under conditions that reduce their viability. You can sprout many kinds of beans by simply soaking them for 12 hours in a little cup of water. After 12 hours of soaking, drain the water and rinse them several times a day. They should sprout within 2-3 days. At that point, you can plant them in a cup of soil about ½-1” under the surface, keep the soil moist, put the cup in a sunny window, and see what happens next. I like sprouting mung beans as you can eat the sprouts or plant them. This is true of many other kinds of beans as well.

Grow Food From Scraps

One of the easiest ways to start growing plants is to stick a part of a plant (e.g., the base of a celery stalk, green onions) in some water or soil and regrow that plant from its part. Click here for instructions on how to start ten common food plants this way.

Get a Mint Cutting from a Friend

Mint is hard to grow from seed, is incredibly easy to grow from a cutting, and almost impossible to kill. Just find a friend who grows mint. They’ll be more than happy to give you a cutting. Whoever takes the cutting should cut off a two to three-inch stem with at least six healthy leaves. Trim off additional leaves closer to the cut. It’s best, but not critical, for the cut to be diagonal and for the clipping to be placed in clean water quickly after the cut. Roots should begin to develop within a week. You can now plant your mint in soil. Mint spreads rapidly, so consider planting it in a pot to keep it contained!

Grow Microgreens Inside

The basic idea is to plant a bunch of herb or greens seeds in an inch of soil in a tray, put them near a south-facing window, and then eat the seedlings. Here’s a great place to start. Research shows that microgreens have 4-40 times more nutrients than their mature leaves! They can help regulate your sugar, improve your thinking and reasoning, and provide many more benefits!

Grow Plants in an Indoor Grow Table

When I was a bit younger, I had model trains and cars that let me play around with things on a small scale. Now, I have an indoor grow setup instead. The basic elements of this system are an 18x36 inch plastic grow table, a 4-bulb, 48-inch T5 fluorescent grow-light fixture, and a timer for the light. My garden sits in front of a south-facing window to take advantage of natural sunlight. 

In addition to being able to very carefully observe the growth of my romaine lettuce, basil, and cilantro, my indoor garden provides me with an opportunity to close some loops on an easy-to-observe scale (see Observing Closed Loops in Nature for a discussion about this central ecological pattern). Remember that the key to closing loops is plugging together the outputs from one element with the inputs of another. For example, I water my garden with the rinse-water from my bean sprouts. I bury selected kitchen scraps in my garden, including left-over starter from my sourdough bread making, mung bean shells from my sprouts, and trimmings from my indoor garden. The outputs of our garden become inputs to our kitchen.

Watering

Before you place plants in soil, you should water your soil thoroughly. This will take more water than you think. Antonio Sanchez, a remarkable native plant restorationist at the Santa Monica Mountains (SAMO) Fund and the bassist in Native Sage Against the Machine, had a group including Nicolete water seedling trays after filling them with dirt. He asked the group to say “when” to stop watering. Once everyone had said "when," he tipped the trays over and each one was dry! We highly recommend you try this one out with kids! Experiencing how much water it takes to thoroughly dampen soil will help you and your kids develop a feeling for watering efficiently and deeply enough for the developing roots.

Many beginning plant nurturers water often and lightly; that is a mistake. As illustrated by the above demonstration by Antonio Sanchez, most folks underestimate the amount of water required to soak soil. With this kind of frequent light watering, water may never reach the depth of a plant's roots, and surface water will interferes with oxygen reaching roots. Instead, water deeply a couple of times a week. To test if your plants need water, stick your finger into the soil to your first knuckle. If the soil is dry down to that depth, water thoroughly.

Education

A performance requires both a performer and an audience. Learning does not require a teacher and a student. Humans achieve our most daunting learning challenges, learning to coordinate our bodies and to talk, without anyone teaching us how. We, like all other learning beings, learn by observing and interacting with our environments. Of course, we also learn through conversation and by actively making sense of our experiences and our conversations. As an Earth-centered educator, I do little teaching. Imprinting information onto others’ brains just never struck me as a thing to do. I also avoid curricula packaged in factories as I avoid food prepared that same way. On the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed conversations involving people really listening to each other. I also enjoy being a guide when I am in familiar territory, being guided when I am not, and sharing resources with others in both directions. Rather than teaching, I consider what I do as nurturing transformative ecological learning environments and communities.

So, when I engage in activities like those above with children, much of the learning happens directly as a result of their engagement in the activities, their curiosity, and their self-motivated desire to make sense of their experiences. I like to support children’s observations by asking questions like: What shape is that leaf? How does this part feel? Is it rough or smooth? Does it have a smell? I also like to support their making sense of what they see: What do you think is happening with these beans? Why do you think it’s so much bigger today than yesterday?  Where do you think the stuff that’s making the plant bigger came from? And, yes, sometimes I tell kids the names of plants or plant parts and share other information with them: We can help plants grow better by taking care of them and saving and planting their seeds, and they take care of us by providing us with food.

Science

“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2015

Gardening can be done in many different ways, from tending the wild as land-based peoples have done for thousands of years to gardens that emulate the factory farms of our current industrial age. Factory farming has contributed significantly to global climate change and ecosystem degradation. To reverse the damage we have done, we must take care of our ecosystems as we obtain a yield as land-based people did and do, rather than poisoning them with insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers that kill soils. The type of gardening practiced by our ancestors and modern land-based peoples is associated with several movements within industrial culture, including permaculture, forest gardening, and regenerative agriculture. All of these forms fall under the general category of ecological design.

Ecological design includes minimizing harm done to ecosystems and thinking about designed systems and their surrounding ecosystems in terms of relationships both within and between those systems. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan (1996) define ecological design as, "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes" (p. 18). In terms of designing ecological gardens, this means (a) not using insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers that kill soils and (b) integrating your garden with living processes, like the cycle of synthesis and decomposition and the mutualistic relationships between plants in your garden and between plants and other organisms. We encourage you to check out our posts Composting and Deep Mulching and Relational Gardening for some how-to information and more explanation of these important ideas.

Wrap Up

We think one of the most important activities any of us could engage in right now is growing food. Growing food is good for us in so many ways: it connects us with nature, produces more nutritious food, increases our happiness by putting us in contact with soil bacteria, makes us more self-reliant, and fuels our dopamine production through reaping the benefits of our hard work in food to eat and beautiful flowers to smell. Growing our food is also wonderful for the planet: it reduces factory farming, reduces the amount of fuel used moving food from there to here, and builds soil, one of our more precious slow-to-renew resources. Finally, for those of you with a revolutionary bent, growing food is a revolutionary act that reduces our dependence on the corporate-capitalist machine.

Mike Hoag is my favorite living permaculture author. One of the many things that I love about his approach is that he introduces permaculture and ecological gardening, one project at a time. I encourage you to check out his project-based book, The Beginner's Landscape Transformation Manual. And, no, we don’t receive any kickbacks from this recommendation.

References/Suggested Readings

Anderson, K. (2005). Tending the Wild. University of California Press.

Braden, D. (2022). Cook What You Grow: A Cookbook for Living a Connected Life. The Living Systems Institute.

Hemenway, T. (2009). Gaia’s Garden. Chelsey Green Publishing Company.

Hoag, M. (2023). The Beginner's Landscape Manual. Transformative Adventures.

Salmon, E. (2020). Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science. Timber Press.

Van der Ryn S. and Cowan S. (1996). Ecological Design. Island Press.