Play with your food

Starting a vegetable garden with your kids has many benefits: it teaches them how plants grow and how to look after them, it’s physical exercise, and the vegetables you grow can be used in the kitchen.

According to Discovery Vitality’s Healthy Active Kids South Africa (HAKSA) report, children love to move and need a lot of physical activity to help them develop motor skills. Active play, like pottering around in the vegetable garden, is a great way to ensure your kids get plenty of physical activity. In addition, the same report found that South African children spend a large proportion of their time sitting down, particularly in front of screens. Spending a lot of time being inactive is strongly linked with obesity and cardiovascular disease.

So, getting your kids up and active in their very own vegetable garden will get them away from too much screen time too.

You don’t need a green thumb

Vegetable gardens come in all shapes and sizes, and even the smallest area can become a fruitful vegetable patch. The best news is, you can decide how big you want to go. You can choose to spend a lot of money and buy specialised tools and products, or go with basics and spend very little. The truth is that even a small vegetable garden can have a good return on investment. Here are three practical tips to start your own vegetable garden:

• Decide how big you want to go. Kids don’t need a lot of space to experiment with growing their own vegetables. Plan your garden based on the space you have, how much time you have, and how much you want to spend. Your garden can range in size from a pot of herbs on the kitchen table, to several square meters of mixed vegetable crops.
• Be picky about your garden. Plant vegetables you will use often. For instance, if you don’t eat tomatoes, don’t plant them just because they grow easily. Be aware of how much produce each crop will yield: for instance, green pepper plants will yield fewer fruits than mini tomatoes, so you may be overwhelmed with tomatoes if you plant the same number of each. It’s always a good idea to start off with fewer plants.
• Your kitchen is a great gardening tool. As soon as you have a vegetable garden, no matter how small, the organic matter from your kitchen can be used to grow more food rather than going into the rubbish bin. Composting kitchen food scraps like fruit and vegetable peels and off cuts can improve your vegetable garden’s yield very quickly.

If you start off small, with some vegetables you use often, you may soon find you enjoy it so much that you want to keep expanding on your knowledge. Check online and in your local bookstore for some gardening hints and tips to make your garden a growing success.

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