My Top Tip for Gardening With Young Kids? Don't. Seriously.

Photo: Sami Grover

OK, so my title for this post is perhaps a little extreme. From salad gardens in containers to crazy plants that will get your kids jazzed about gardening, there are plenty of ways to have fun in the garden and not lose your mind doing it. But if you are contemplating starting a garden with very young kids - and by that I really mean babies and young toddlers - my advice would be to think hard about whether you are better off waiting. Or at least taking a long hard look at what you can realistically get done.

I wish I had.

My wife and I moved into our house a few years ago. Being an enthusiastic, but somewhat impractical, TreeHugger, I immediately planned an extensive raised bed garden that I imagined would provide a large amount of our household veggies. On top of that I took on various odd ball garden projects like growing shiitake mushrooms on logs, oyster mushrooms in coffee grounds, and even backyard beekeeping.

The first year or two went fine. Not exactly feeding the 5000 as my over active imagination had envisioned, but not bad for a beginner either. Then Lilia (now 2) was born. I pushed on, thinking "what better way to introduce my child to the natural world." I planted lettuce and garlic; I dug a big asparagus bed; with the help of a friend I installed a blueberry patch. And then I fell way, way behind on weeding, watering and generally keeping up with all the metaphorical plates that I had spinning in the air.

Between writing, and day jobs, enjoying my beautiful new daughter, changing diapers and picking up toys, the garden just started to feel like something I was supposed to be doing, not somewhere that I wanted to spend my time. To be fair, I can't entirely blame Lilia or parenthood. I suspect I have always been a lazivore gardener at heart, and should have started small rather than trying to create a mini farm.

I've already documented how my bees were the first to go. And, as my wife and I await the birth of our second daughter, I recently wrote over at TreeHugger about how I have hatched a grand plan for growing more food that involves growing a whole lot less plants:

Next year I plan on growing absolutely nothing. I'll put the garden to bed this Fall, restructuring its design, mulching heavily, and letting nature replenish the soil life. I'll continue to do any routine maintenance needed (weeding etc), and finish off any other preparation projects. And I'll harvest any yield from perennial crops like the asparagus, fig trees and blueberries. But I won't plant a single, edible annual until 2013.

Much like a diner's eyes can be too big for their stomach, a gardener's eyes can be too big for their time/skills/willingness to work. One of the most important planks in my new strategy is to shrink our garden from 8 raised beds and a number of peripheral annual herb and flower beds to just 4 annual beds and my asparagus patch.

The first part of the garden shrinkage happened today (pictured above), and boy does it feel good already. But this is not just about building a significantly smaller garden, or taking a year off to enjoy the new arrival. It is about taking a long, hard look at what I can and want to achieve in the garden, and then setting priorities accordingly.

In case anyone hasn't told you, kids are an awful lot of hard work. And so are gardens. There are ways they can peacefully coexist - but that involves a whole lot of planning, a little humility, and a willingness to backtrack when you've taken on too much.

I share this not to discourage any parental gardeners out there. Far from it, in fact. I think that every family can and should have some space to grow food and flowers and watch nature at work. But they should make sure it remains a pleasure, not a chore.

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