Plants for a Children’s Vegetable Garden
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- May
- 2
Here’s our weekly Ask the Master Gardeners column, courtesy of Cornell Cooperative Extension
Q: I would like to do some vegetable gardening with my grade-school children here in Tarrytown. The area where we live, however, is overrun with deer and they do significant damage to our ornamental plants, so I imagine they would really feast on our vegetable garden. Can you suggest some deer-resistant vegetables that I could grow with my children and that will produce crops so the children aren’t terribly disappointed at harvest time?
— Mother of three
A: Vegetables that are deer resistant? Why not try herbs instead? There are almost no vegetables a hungry deer won’t find edible.
The deer would love to feast on just about any and all vegetables you’d plant, particularly the lettuce and spinach and parsley that you’ll probably put in for harvest while the students are still in school.
The only deer-resistant vegetables I can think of are rhubarb, the entire onion family, including garlic, and hot peppers.
Rhubarb is fun for kids but it’s so outsized, and onions and hot peppers are not as much fun. I personally have entertained Girl Scout troops for hours in my herb garden.
The variety of smells alone is fascinating. They can nip off a leaf and then smell and taste it. They are so surprised that a leaf can smell like gum (peppermint) or taste sweeter than sugar (stevia), smell like shampoo or soap (rosemary or lavender) or taste like cucumber. Then there is mint for drinks and mint jelly.
It’s because of the pungent oils within the leaves of the herbs that the deer won’t bother them. After harvesting your herbs, you can make tea, cookies and all sorts of goodies.
If you decide on a vegetable garden, I strongly suggest buying four tall garden stakes and attaching mesh deer fencing around them to prevent their foraging.
Four-foot high stakes should be sufficient as these vegetables grow low to the ground. If you plan on planting tomatoes, beans and taller crops, make the enclosure taller.
— Francesca Jones, master gardener based in North Salem, Joanne Redding of Rye and Barbara Rissmeyer of Tarrytown
This entry was posted
on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 11:50 am by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
