10 ways to get grandkids into gardening

Mark Dwyer has gardened all his life but lately he has an assistant: his 2-year-old grandson, Miles. “He’s just getting interested in nurturing,”  says Dwyer, 53 , who lives in Janesville ,

Wisconsin, and is the garden manager at the 3-acre Edgerton Hospital Healing Garden. So far, Miles is in charge of a few houseplants   (including an echeveria he dubbed Tarimba) and a

low-growing plant container in Dwyer’s yard. Dwyer is a fan of encouraging adults to get kids of all ages into gardening. There’s the learning experience of success and failure as well as

the bond it creates with grandparents, says Dwyer, who is the former director of horticulture at Rotary Botanical Gardens in Janesville.   “I’ll never begrudge that time spent,”  he says

about gardening with Miles and his own two daughters when they were young. “Even if it doesn’t create lifelong gardeners, it creates that lifelong bond, really.”  If you’re ready to share

your own interest in gardening or just want to have some horticultural fun with the kids in your life, here are some ways to make the garden the place to be. 1. DITCH EXPECTATIONS AND GET

YOUR HANDS DIRTY. Let go of rules and the goal of perfection, says Jason Skipton, executive director of Growing Gardens, a community development and sustainability nonprofit in Portland,

Oregon, that helps homeowners and schools develop gardens. Let kids dig in the dirt, pick flowers, or hunt for worms or do whatever it is that makes them happy to be outdoors, he and others

say . Let them choose plants at the nursery, even if you’re not sure it’s a good choice. Gardening is all about experience and experimentation.  “The garden shouldn’t be a place that is like

every other part of our world,” says Skipton. “You go to school, you get in line, you sit at your desk — the garden should be the opposite of that.” Getty Images 2. DEFINE “GARDEN” HOWEVER

YOU LIKE. You can introduce kids to horticulture via a vegetable garden, a perennial bed, a butterfly corner, a potted cactus, a no-fail houseplant (think: philodendron), a sweet potato vine

or even a trip to the local botanical garden. Gardener and writer Sharon Lovejoy of San Luis Obispo, California, suggests starting in your kitchen. Lovejoy, 78, grandmother of five and the

author of several books, including _Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots_ and _Camp Granny,_ says to try her “garbage garden”  — growing vegetables like carrot tops and sweet potatoes. To grow

a carrot top, just cut off the top of the carrot, leaving about an inch of carrot below where the leaves emerge, and place it on saucer of water without submerging the top. It will sprout

roots below and greenery above. To grow a sweet potato, stick it with three or four toothpicks and suspend it in a jar or narrow vase. Fill with water about a third or halfway up the potato.

Place in a sunny window, and in a few days your potato will begin to sprout roots and, eventually, a beautiful vine. “It’s indoor gardening and it’s stuff that might get thrown into the

garbage, but it still has a life force in it,” Lovejoy says.  “It’s really important for kids to learn about that life force. They’re not going to cut into a tree or hurt something if they

realize that it has a life force.”