Here’s a trick to make beautiful gardens and teach a lesson. I call it Plants from Piggly Wiggly. It doesn’t matter if your garden is formal or haphazard, large or small, in containers or beds, you can have fun planting things that you buy at the grocery store.         

From a gardening standpoint, it works. From a personality standpoint, it charms people. From an educational standpoint, it’s so old-fashioned that it’s hip. At any age, anyone who eats will get some fun out of it.          

Right now, in winter, you can plant a few easy things. These make great projects for children and make beautiful additions to your garden. Most importantly, it reminds your children that plants become food and food makes our body. Kobe burgers, fried calamari, pineapples and potatoes -- we depend on plants to nourish us.

 

A Winter Container

Go to the grocery and buy a clove of elephant garlic. In gardens I use this totally reliable, perennial allium mixed into perennial borders. In containers, mix it with narcissus or pansies or sprinkle in a pack of radish seeds over the container. You can even buy flax seed at the grocery and sow those in for spring color, but remember they won’t come up until spring.

If you put your garlic in a pot, place the pot outside. Water it every three days or so. In three weeks a fast spear emerges. In six weeks you’ll see thick, steel-gray leaves. In mid-May, giant bouncy flowers of lavender come up, always with a tiny jester’s cap.

 

Upcoming Seasons

As a boy on a hardscrabble, South Carolina farm, we grew all of our own food. I was organic before organic was cool. But kids today don’t have that opportunity. That’s why I’m so impressed and in awe when my mother can sit with her 8-year-old Glee-loving-super-texting granddaughter and make cutting up seed potatoes captivating.

In Zone 8, we plant potatoes around Valentine’s Day. Buy those cute new purple ones, golden fingerlings and tiny reds at the grocery. Cut them in half or quarters, leaving one of the eyes, which is a sort of dark spot, or a sprout. Let them sit a few days, and then plant them in a bed with your pansies. As the pansies fade in the heat, the vines will scramble around. Potato vines add a dark, elegant green to spring gardens, but they quickly fade or get chewed up by beetles. Then it’s time to dig and eat!

 

Tips for Success

It’s Not about a Meal. Remember that success in planting from the produce section is about making connections. It’s a story for the garden to tell, and a reminder that plants are food and food can become plants. If you harvest enough of anything to scramble with an egg - great! No worries about production quantity here.

Buy Organic. Remember when potatoes used to sprout in the bag? Now many things in the grocery are sprayed with growth retardants for longer shelf life. Those synthetic chemicals will keep plants from growing in your garden too. Buy from the organic section.

Make a Hip Patio Garden

Create a beautiful and very hip patio garden around your garlic pot. Seed into another pot some barley or wheat. Both make vertical, silvery accent plants. Both are available at your local flour center! (The baking aisle.) Lessons like this can often be watched, moved and shared best in containers.

 

Remember the Old Tricks

Recently, I did a lecture on projects for grandparents to do with their grandchildren. I asked how many people had simply put an avocado seed in water and made a plant. Everyone. Then I asked, who had done this with their grandchildren. None. We forget to do things that are familiar. Surely they did this at school, the grandparents asked. Nope, school is different now. It makes it all the more important to do the simple things with your kids, even as you prepare a meal.

 

 

---

Jenks Farmer, horticulturist, designer, curator of Moore Farms, wants to fill everyone’s garden, patio, parking lot and body with beautiful, nutritious plants. You can download a video of his lecture on projects for grandparents at plantsfoodbody.com.

---