Maybe you’re itching to get back into the garden after the cold dark winter. And maybe the garden is your escape from the demands of being a parent. But don’t discount the potential craic of having your kids help you with the jobs. Most kids will express some dismay at being torn from the cosy womb of Nintendo and Playstation, but once you get them ready for the outdoors, they will lose no time in finding creative ways to play beside you.

Kids are surprisingly useful in the garden – as long as you’re working alongside them. If you have a wormery, and you’re trying to rotate the trays, consider having your kids help you separate the worms from the castings. They are adept at spotting errant worms, and they will want to make sure that each and every one gets to their new home on level 2 of the wormery.

When my youngest son was 3, he planted a couple of potatoes that sprouted in storage (NOT seed potatoes). He spent a lot of time watering them with worm tea, and earthing them up with worm castings. Any earthworms he (or his playmates) found in the garden were rehomed beside his spuds to help them grow. The resulting (amazingly large and healthy) potato plants resisted blight until September (and this was the rainy summer of 2008), and when harvested yielded the best of all my potato plants. Of course he was proud, and of course he is now the potato planting expert in his class at school.

If you can get enough motivated kids, they can operate like a plague of locusts – and I mean that in a positive way. I teach gardening at my son’s school, and if the students can correctly identify a weed, you can clear a substantial area in record time. They are not so great at removing the tap roots of plants like docks, but with a bit of coaching, that can come too.

Earlier this year, we planned to put in a pond so that we could attract frogs, and generally increase the biodiversity. Well, that’s what we told the teachers anyhow. It was a great opportunity to get covered in muck, much more fun than being stuck inside reading and writing. The school has been built recently, so the grounds consist of a small layer of grass on top of builders rubble. Not the ideal digging conditions. If it had been my job to dig this pond, I would have given up after 15 minutes – it was very tough going, and whatever we managed to dig filled up with water immediately.

We divided the class into digging groups of 4. Most of them had wellies or old shoes and socks. I had brought a crowbar for loosening up the soil. The digging gangs dug out tiny amounts of shale, muck, and we had a baling crew to remove the water. The rest of the class sang songs to keep us entertained – the resemblance to a chain gang did not escape me. After a gloriously mucky hour, persistence paid off and the pond was big enough – about a meter deep and wide, and twice as long . And I know that I would never have accomplished that on my own. 

Think back to when you first discovered gardening – was it working side by side with a parent? Are those now treasured memories? Or were you jumping over the fence to work with a patient neighbour, and discovering a whole world you never dreamed of?

So, get out there with your kids, or invite the neighbours kids around, if you don’t currently have any of your own. You will be passing on an awareness of nature that will give them pleasure for the rest of their lives, and skills that may help them to feed themselves. And you will have a great time in the process, and deepen your relationship with them.