When Dale Zigelsky was growing up in Tennessee, he spent a good deal of time outdoors helping his dad with the lawn and conspiring with his brother to sneak watermelon seeds into their mother’s perennial garden beds.
Now at age 25, Zigelsky is part of a new generation of gardeners interested in connecting others to the natural world. As one of the youngest Master Gardeners in Boulder County, Zigelsky is working to help individuals of all ages learn how to grow their own food.
Zigelsky and his business partner, Catherine Harley, started a gardening business in 2009 to create square-foot gardens for people who’d prefer someone else do the heavy lifting. Personal Family Farmers () builds, installs, plants and helps new gardeners get their vegetable gardens off to a good start.
“Our mission is to get as many people as possible to grow their own food,” Zigelsky says. “Square-foot gardens are easy for beginning gardeners to succeed (with) from the start.”
Personal Family Farmers is in its second year of building and planting gardens and Zigelsky says interest continues to grow. All of the gardener-clients had successful gardens last season, and about half of them felt confident enough in their new gardening skills to do the fall and spring planting on their own, he says.
Many of these new gardeners include other 20-somethings who want the hands-on experience of growing their own food.
“It goes to creating a sustainable future,” he says. “They want to be more self-reliant and not depend so much on others for food.”
Zigelsky thinks it’s important to get children in the garden while they’re still young so it can become a good habit as they grow up.
“Encourage them to be outside with you while you’re gardening,” he says.
He suggests starting small by giving kids a square of garden where they can plant quick-growing lettuces and radishes and watch seeds transform into food.
Grower-gatherer grandmothers
Gardening is second nature to Christine Ginnity, 38, thanks to two grandmothers who fostered her love for horticulture — one through pristine garden beds and the other while hunting for wild plums and asparagus.
The youth program coordinator for Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins says there are easy and inexpensive ways to get children of all ages interested in gardening.
“The most fun for kids is when they can dig right in,” she says. “Find a sprout growing in the garden and dig it up to see what kind of seed it’s connected to.”
Ginnity also recommends having children plant beans or peas along the sides of a clear plastic cup or glass so they can watch the germination process.
Other ideas include borrowing a plant guide from the library and taking it to an open space to look for native plants or creating home-made seed tape with toilet paper, carrot seeds, and a cornstarch and flour paste.
Ginnity says one of the best ways to get kids interested in gardening is to tap into their current hobbies. If there’s an interest in science, conduct mini-experiments with plants; if it’s art, have them color pictures of plants or draw the garden of their dreams.
Mapping projects such as Journey North’s Tulip Project () appeal to older kids and gets them hooked into plant life cycles, climate and weather, she says.
“Projects like this help encourage kids to hone their interest in gardens or the natural world because they’re recording data and posting it online on a national site.”
Whether capitalizing on gardening as a learning opportunity or just spending time in the children’s garden, Ginnity says her favorite part of her job is getting whole families involved in growing together.
Cultivating a career
A budding botanist in Littleton agrees that spending time outdoors is a good way to cultivate a love for plants.
Jackson Osborne, 13, says he’s been growing plants for as long as he can remember. He thinks he first noticed the different forms and shapes of plants while hiking with his family in the mountains.
“More kids should be interested in plants, because they’re fun to grow and they’re important,” he says.
The seventh-grader at Deer Creek Middle School says he likes almost every plant that grows, but is especially drawn to exotic plants.
“Right now I’m growing loofah gourd, Ugli fruit and blue corn,” he says of the crop he’s started in his bedroom. He has an avocado tree he planted from a seed and is also growing a white plumeria plant.
Osborne says it takes work to get these plants to grow, but it’s worth it.
“In a few years you can show off the tree you started from seed and say, ‘See what I grew?’ Plus you can eat the fruit, too.”
When he was in sixth grade, Osborne built a hydroponics system from PVC pipe for the school science fair to test whether plants grow faster in water or in soil.
He says experimenting with plants can lead to developing new crops that are better for the land than corn and soybeans. He also has an interest in learning to become a hybridizer so he can grow new varieties of plants with larger leaves or bigger fruit.
Eventually he’d like to start his own garden of one-of-a-kind plants, like a special variety of blue popping corn that doesn’t just have blue kernels, but would turn blue when popped. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”
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