| "What are you doing?" she asked.
"Picking up chicken poopies," I replied, since my first task was scooping all the chicken poos off the path and into the compost.
"Ewwww!" she said. "I'll do something else."
"Can you help me plant some plants?" I asked, looking outside to see the chickens digging all of the dirt out of three new California native plants I bought yesterday.
"I'll water them," she told me. And off we went.
First, I let her select where we would plant each of our new plants - a lemonade berry, a type of native lilac, and a bush monkeyflower. Then we got her toy shovel and my real one, and her toy watering can and my real one, and filled our watering cans with water. She watered one of the nearby plants and told me, "Plants drink water from the soil."
"You are so smart!" I replied, "And you know what else? They eat sunshine, and they use it to make sugar!"
"That's CRAZY!" she said. I love how kids her age have an appropriate sense of wonder at nature. Last year, after she grew some broccoli from seeds she planted herself, we looked at them together, and I said, "I wonder how that seed new exactly how to grow into a broccoli?" And she was very impressed (as am I) that a tiny little seed could figure out exactly how to turn into a giant broccoli plant.
At her age, "working" in the garden is really play. I asked her to help me dig my hole and she told me she wanted to dig her own, next to mine. Ultimately, she came over to help me with mine. When it was deep enough, I said, "I have a funny idea. Let's put worm poopies in the hole so the plants can eat them!"
She thought it was a great idea "as long as I don't have to touch them - because that would be gross." So off we went to the worm bin, where we selected a few scoopfuls of worm castings and checked out the worms as we went. She picked up a few to play with them, and gave one a pretend kiss (she showed me how she did it, kissing the air NEAR the worm... I told her that was a good pretend kiss to give worms, much better than really kissing a worm).
We found lots of worm cocoons, and she told me she wished she could see the babies come out, because they would be cute. So we found some baby worms in our bin too. Then we went back to our plants, where she helped scoop some castings into our hole.
For each plant, after the hole was dug, she helped me put in the castings, then I put in the plant, and we both put the soil back around it. Then she gently watered each one. We agreed that plants were funny because they liked eating poopies.
After that, I got back to my original job of scooping chicken poos off our path and into the compost, and I picked up our little chicken Diana to let my little friend pet her. Ms. Preschool reminded me of an earlier promise to let her pick flowers, so she carefully cut off several calendula flowers, and then we went inside to put them in a glass of water.
That was it for us gardening today, because at that very moment, it began to rain. I think it was perfect timing because a four year old attention span doesn't last forever, and I was running out of "fun" garden chores that didn't simply involve me with a pitchfork and her watching. I just love watching her grow up with the garden as a normal part of her life. (A week before her 4th birthday, she told us she wanted a strawberry and blueberry cake, so we better plant the berries so they could grow in time.) I just can't wait to see how her knowledge of plants, chickens, and gardening grows with her in the coming years. Even her too cool big sis has gotten a dose of gardening knowledge... She probably knows more about pollination than any other kid in her class. |
