Gardening With the Very Young

We always assume, that just because our baby can barely walk, that she can not do anything. This is so far from the truth as to be almsot laughable!
A young child is as easily able to learn new things as an older child, in fact, most people will tell you, the younger the better.
When going out into the garden the other day, I tried an experiment. I let my daughter, at fourteen months, roam free. She dug in the dirt with a trowel. She splashed in a plant pot saucer. She sowed seeds. She picked dandelions. She looked closely at bugs. She had fun in the garden, and I really had to do very little with her.
Our garden is not fenced in. We have a large hill in the middle down which she could potentially fall. There have been snake sightings this year already, and it is only spring!
I have personally seen the poison ivy climbing up a tree, and the black widows and brown recluses hiding near the underside of the house. The garden, quite frankly, terrifies me.
But I have also seen the peach tree in blossom, and sat down in order to draw it. I have watched the birds flock to the bird feeder, and learned to identify their songs by ear alone. I have learned, that I don't need to scream at the huge (almost tarantula sized) wolf spiders, and I can almost ignore the other bugs crawling on me (except the wasps!). For an Englishwoman in the swamplands of Virginia, this is indeed an accomplishment!
I take time to smell the lilacs, or the air after a summer thunderstorm.
I enjoy watching the maples seeds come whirling down around me in the wind, it is almost like being in a green snowstorm. Only warmer! I love to watch the pear tree petals blow and hear the rustling of the leaves in the breeze. All these too are part of God's creation, and I have begun to share them with my children.
How could I let my baby miss out on all the beauty, for the sake of a few pesky nuisances? Well, maybe that is downplaying them a little, but I have to take some risk sometime, right?
My son can identify birds, plants, trees and bugs, information he has picked up because he has been allowed to roam outside, and encouraged to look at something before running from it in panic. We taught him not to stop and stare at a snake, but to run and tell us aboutit. We showed him poison ivy so he can identify it. In short, we repared him. The baby? Well she knows what a bird is, it was one of her first words! She can say dandelion and weed. She knows how to smell a flower and how to admire the moon. Most of this was incidental. I was teaching her brother, and while we had the birds on the feeder, would mention that they were birds. I'd tell her that the yellow flower she was so enamoured with was a dandelion. She got weed from her Daddy, since her mother thinks most weeds are medicine! She smelled the flowers because I did, watches the moon because I show it to her. Who says that the babies can not enjoy nature too?
She may not yet be aware of the danger, but I keep her in easy reach... of one of us. She knows to come when called, and not to touch if I say "No!", and while it is not quite as good a lesson as my son has had, we still have time... but she is well on her way to appreciation already!
She was given the trowel to dig with to keep her out of trouble... and she had so much fun digging in the dirt! We asked her to plant the seeds because we knew she'd enjoy helping. Sometimes the little things take forever with her there, but spending that extra time now, guarantees that she will enjoy the garden as much as her older brother and parents do!