Of Kids and Bees
by Catherine Rose in Homemaking on Thursday, June 10, 2010 6:00 AM
My daughter, Adele, likes to hold bees. Before you think me a crazy mother, I should clarify that she holds male bees, called drones, and I should also tell you that male bees have no stinger. So, when Adele holds a drone, she is holding a big bumbling yellow and black flying insect that is totally harmless.
Maybe you wouldn’t go so far as allowing your children to hold bees, but I think we all agree that children benefit from time outdoors. We don’t want children with what Richard Louv calls “nature deficit disorder”, after all, and we know how well Junior sleeps after he spends the day running in the sun.
But, beyond simply spending more time at the park, I propose a few measures that will produce great results and might even foster in your children a cautious affection for stinging insects.
The Measures
My husband and I live in an urban neighborhood on .17 acres. We have a tiny backyard, in which we have crammed a grape arbor, beehive, compost pile, chicken coop, three garden beds, blackberry brambles, sandbox, playscape, and a teensy bit of grass.
My point in mentioning this is to demonstrate that you don’t need 5 acres in order to explore your agrarian options. You simply need to check on your particular neighborhood policies and urban ordinances in order to determine what’s legal for your backyard; most cities offer a digital copy of zoning regulations, so check online first. My family lives in Austin, Texas, which prides itself on being rather weird, and we are allowed to have chickens and a beehive on our meager acreage; to demonstrate Austin’s weirdness, I can tell you that we could keep a goat in the city if we only had 1/4 acre. Oh, how I wish we have 1/4 acre.
Your particular community might not be so generous to allow you backyard hens, but you can certainly raise a small garden or keep a compost pile which thrives with insect life. You could grow a butterfly garden and watch as the monarch caterpillars devour your dill, fennel, and parsley. And, you can develop relationships with local farmers who will supply you with good meat from animals who lived happy lives and who will welcome you for an on-farm visit at which your children can pet the horse and scratch the pig’s snout.
The Benefits
My children are still very young—3 years, 2 years, and 4 months—yet I already see many happy results from their interaction with creation.
In the first place, they have begun happily eating their vegetables. I used to be wary of offering my children fresh vegetables because I expected them to simply waste good food. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, when the vegetables taste good (ie. when they are good vegetables from good soil), my children like them.
For example, we grew kholrabi in our garden this spring, which I consider to have a grown-up flavor, but my children delighted in not only harvesting the big purple bulbous stalks and feeding the leaves to the chickens, but actually eating the kholrabi. They call it “code-a-rabi.” Very cute.
They also surprised me by savoring broccolini, asparagus, green beans, and sweet potatoes, though beets are still considered undesirable. Barbara Kingsolver, in her lovely read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
In our modern Cafe Dysfunctional, ‘Eat you vegetables’ has become a battle cry of mothers against presumed unwilling subjects ... Mom is losing no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. [But], the fashion in vegetables may come back around to edibility. Flavor in food is a novelty that seems to keep customers coming back.
I agree.
Another benefit of this life lived in relationship with creation is that it greatly assists our schooling efforts. Children learn easily when learning is experiential, and much of the material covered in math and science is that which is found in a garden or chicken coop. My children, simply by virtue of having these resources in their backyard, will learn about the life cycles and reproductive processes of many plants and chickens and bees. They will learn about yeast and fermentation when their father turns his meager grape harvest into three bottles of wine. They will learn about pH and drainage and geology when they help add compost and other amendments to our garden soil. You get the idea.
And, finally, this “granola” life offers your children something they want so much to have—more time working with you. My kids still think the best time possible is that spent in the spotlight of their parents’ attention, and that happens very naturally when they are applauded for pulling up weeds in the garden or gathering eggs from the hen house. They are not underfoot, in a negative sense, when we are working together in the backyard because they are able to help in many small ways. From this shared work, they gain a sense of their importance to the family, as well as one of ownership, insofar as they have animals and plants who will die without their attention.
How To Get Started
Perhaps you’d like to live a bit more like Laura Ingalls, but aren’t sure where to begin. Here are a few resources I have found helpful:
- Local Harvest.org This is a great website which helps you find local sources for food and handmade goods.
- Your local feedstore or hardware store. Unless you live downtown in a big city, chances are that you can find a feedstore nearby. We have at least three on the outskirts of Austin, and it is at one of those that we buy our chickens and accompanying supplies—hay, feed, books about how to raise chickens, etc.
- Books! If you are interested in spending more time reading on these subjects, here are a few good authors—Joel Salatin
- Baker Creek Seeds For heirloom seeds, we like to order here. Their catalog is simply beautiful and they have amazingly lovely, hardy, and tasty vegetables.
(lots of how-to advice for raising animals, as well as general wittiness), Gene Logsdon, Ricki Carroll (quite the queen of homemade cheesemaking). Also, two of our favorite periodicals are “Countryside” magazine and “Farming” magazine.
The author of the Psalms writes often of the bounty that comes from the earth and of God’s providence through creation. For my family, our participation in that bounty is a source of joy, education, and time together.
Maybe you will find that the same is true for you. Best of luck!
—Catherine Rose is a mother of four. You might remember her and her husband Devin from this post a short while ago. They blog at St. Joseph’s Vanguard and Our Lady’s Train.
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