gardening report (gardening with kids)

We are in the middle of yard sale/garage sale madness at this house! Five families have dropped off stuff at my house to be sold Thursday through Saturday. The kids (mine plus three other friends) will have a lemonade and cookie stand too! 

But in the midst of pricing, organizing, and setting up to sell all of our junk, I mean slightly used wonderful stuff, we had to do some planting.

First off I just wanted to ask if any gardeners have ever seen Rhubarb that looks this THIS!

Should I harvest it? Is it suppose to flower like that? What do I do with those really long stalks? Any advice you have on harvesting rhubarb would be AWESOME! Please leave a comment. 

Today we planted yellow onions, romaine lettuce, yellow beans and bush beans. The girls had a great time taking turns to plant with their dad. 

 Our method for having the girls help is to hand them a few seeds and then we point to where the seed should go and they put it in. Once all the seeds are planted we work together to push the soil back over the seeds. I imagine this is a pretty common way of having little kids plant row crops.

Sam, at age 4, is already pretty good at handling the smaller seeds (carrots, onions, etc.) but Avery is just on her first planting year to be involved so she just helped with the bigger bean seeds.

Beans are, in my opinion, some of the best plants to grow with young kids. The seeds are big and easy to handle. The seeds sprout fairly quickly so that they don't have to be patient for too long. The beans are easy to pick off and a great immediate snack in the yard. My girls both loved helping to pick the beans last year and I know this year they will get just as into the process.

To see a list of other great plants to grow with your little ones head over here. And be sure to check out the book "Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots"  by Sharon Lovejoy. It is an awesome resource for gardening with kids. 

How is your gardening going so far this year?  And WHAT do I do with my rhubarb?!

Comments

[Ada]

Cut those flowers off! They'll make the rhubarb stalks woody. Looks like it's definitely time to harvest it. To harvest, I simply cut off the stalk as close to the ground as possible, then cut off the leaf. (The leaf is poisonous!) You'll want to cut off the flower stalks as close to the ground as possible too. The rhubarb my parents grow is also quite green in color, so I'm guessing that you just have a greener colored rhubarb variety than the ruby red rhubarb we usually think of when we think rhubarb. Enjoy that rhubarb! I'm so jealous. Mine is *weeks* away from being harvested!

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For a lot of the leafy produce, flowering isn't a good thing and signals the end of production. But you can stop it by pruning off the flowers. You know I have never eaten rhubarb. But I never ate kale until this year when we grew it in our garden. It's super easy plant, and my daughter liked it bc it was purple.

[San]

Yep, get rid of the flowers and harvest the crop. Looks like you'll be eating plenty of rhubarb crumble or it is lovely stewed with fresh ginger in its own syrup and served with ice cream or yogurt.

[code avantage]

Gardening is one of my hobby. You share such nice information and do best gardening activity with children. Its amazing work.

[elsie]

sure the girls can't wait for those shoots to appear.

Rhubarb diced and syewed with eating apples, a little water if needed, is great

[FrancesVettergreenVisualArtist]

Well, I'm a 4th-generation rhubarb gardener...woukdnt live without it. Pie, jam, rhubarb cordial...yum. Mine was passed to me from a friend and thrives under my deck.

You'll be pleased to hear that you have not ruined your rhubarb. You can leave the blooms if you like the look, it really won't make much difference to the rest of the stalks, at least not according to the rest of the rhubarb experts (aka grandmothers) around here. That said, I always pull mine off. Just break the thick stem down low. Don't eat it.

Harvesting is easy: just grab a stalk close to its base and pull. It'll come off easily. It will be more tender if you don't let it get too thick; you're better with multiple small harvests than waiting till the plant gets big enough for the whole season's jam. It freezes well...just wash & slice it & in it goes.

The leaves are not poisonous, they are just too high in oxalic acid to be edible. They taste awful anyway, no one's going to try more than a mouthful. They are perfectly safe to compost.

[FrancesVettergreenVisualArtist]

When we were little we used to eat rhubarb stalks by dipping the end in a little bowl of sugar...

[JDaniel4's Mom]

Seeds are so hard to hold onto for little ones. My four year old needed bigger seeds to hold. Other slipped through his fingers.