Eco-Friendly Parenting: Tips to create a ‘green’ mindset from within your household, encouraging your children to grow into environmentally responsible adults.
Make gardening green:
Plant a tree! – As cliché as it sounds, the more trees, the merrier! Through photosynthesis, plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, making the air around you fresher, the environment looking cleaner and even creating potential homes for birds and other animals.
India’s Minister of Environment Jairam Ramesh, together with Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, indulge in planting saplings over 48 acres within Jaunapur (New Delhi) before World Environment Day this year! ¹
Compost your kitchen scraps! – Ideal for households with lots of garden space), composting is a process in which you use leftover kitchen food and household materials to create nutritious soil for gardening! It requires 2 – 3 months, a carefully controlled compositing site, moisture and air…stay tuned for an upcoming step-by-step guide to composting!
Use banana peels as a fertilizer! – Banana peels are a great source of phosphorus and potassium, excellent for plants. Simply cut your banana peels into smaller pieces (easier to disintegrate), add fresh soil and use when planting!²
Why not make it a family activity?
“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.” (Arundhati Roy)
Getting your kids interested in gardening makes it more fun overall. With young kids, a good place to start is to talk about food chains and the importance of growing vegetables. Make it educational by teaching them how plants grow and why they’re important…make it fun by getting out the in garden and getting your hands dirty! Some more helpful tips to keep in mind…
Get child-friendly gardening tools – Gardening tools can often be sharp and quite dangerous – invest in wooden child-friendly versions of these to ensure safety!
Give responsibility – assign a gardening space to your kids to hand over some responsibility…it works wonders when children have something to take care of themselves. Keep asking what they would like to plant and invest in these ideas (as long as they are reasonable!) to maintain their interest.
Eat what you grow! – If growing veggies in your garden, pick them and use them for cooking – involve your kids in the process so they can feel the pride from successful gardening.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Notes:
¹Article in ‘The Hindu’, June 4, 2011 (http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelhi/article2075694.ece)
²How to Use Bananas as Fertilizer (ehow article) (http://www.ehow.com/how_2126328_use-bananas-as-fertilizer.html)
