What's in Daddy's Socks: Children's Gardening Program

On summer weekends we invite local children to attend our annual forest walk. Our invitation is always received with a great deal of attention from schools and children's nature programs. The only instruction we give the children is to make sure they bring a pair of their daddy's socks for the walk. During the first few minutes upon arriving at our lesson area the children are busy pulling their daddy's socks over their tennis shoes while comparing stories of how big their daddy's feet appear to be. When we all set out into nature's most successful victory garden ever, a Pacific Coast conifer forest, we are exuberant about the possibilities of what we will see in the forest, what we will taste and what we will feel. We always find some berries that are still sour, while others are sweet. We skid our palms over the soft gumdrop shaped flower heads of Bull thistle while closing our eyes. We try to make whistles out of horsetails and near creeks we find slimy salamanders under rocks. When we return to our lesson area the children plant their daddy's socks in a flat bed of potting soil. They take the planted bed home with them and plant their daddy's socks in their own backyard.

When asked through the years, "What is the most important lesson your students have learned from your walks through the forest?" my reply is always the same, "At the end of these walks the children plant the socks into the soil and a magic journey full of promise and faith begins. From here on out every child who plants their daddy's socks is intimately connected to any biology lesson you could give via flower anatomy, any literature lesson you could expose a child to via the mysteries in nature or the stories of the forces of good and evil, any mathematics lesson via handfuls of seeds, any green living ideas you may come up with via composting and fertilizing.  All lessons in all areas of inquiry are squeezed or stuck into the fabric of a size 12 pair of socks. And each of these lessons is important in its own way."

As the children watch their gardens sprout out of their daddy's socks, they begin to navigate a course between their own intimate connection to the new plants and the more general happenings with living things in a garden. This connection between intimacy and more general events with living things leads to a very high degree of sustainability of a “daddy's sock garden”. In fact, this high degree of sustainability can't be found in any other garden that doesn't germinate out of such intimate things as a pair of daddy's socks.

It's this bottom-up investment the child is making that guarantees many generations of plants to be successful, season after season after season. Each child cares for each and every plant; watches it like he watches the stars, waters it as if he could hear the plant asking for water, feeds it as if he just knew it was hungry, wipes off any beetles, aphids, white flies from the leaves as if he could hear the plant screaming for relief from the bites, the choked off apical buds, the voracious eating of larvae. When a child takes his daddy's socks home with him or to his grandparents home and plants the socks there, the degree of sustainability of his garden is even greater than if he did not remove the socks from our garden in our lesson area. Some children even call their grandparents and agree on a delivery date for the socks to arrive. This happens when his grandparents live maybe only 50 miles away or 1000 miles away. The distance is not negotiable. After all, it's daddy's socks we are talking about.

The magic journey full of promise and faith is larger than any globe's circumference, any planet's orbit. It goes on and on and on. Having daddy involved in a child’s garden from the very beginning gives a child a strong sense of belonging, a well grounded sense of leadership, and a genuine sense of community. If you and a child are fortunate enough to plant a garden with his daddy's socks you will find that the questions the child asks are far more important than the answers that you have. Daddy's socks seem to bring out the soul of the child.