I have always felt that there is something healing about using your hands to dig in the soil. Whether it is planting a tree, flowers, or a vegetable garden, I love the smell of freshly turned soil, and how the cool dampness feels on my skin. I love watching for seeds to sprout, or waiting to see new buds of leaves on a tree that was dormant all winter.

I figure if gardening is healing for me, it just might be healing for my children as well. If you would like a project for your children to work on together to improve their sibling bonds, I would highly suggest planting a garden.

All three of my children who were adopted tend to be more insecure than my biological children. They become jealous of each other, vying for my attention, and when they play games together such as board games, the competition can become rather intense to the point that often the loser becomes upset and stomps off saying that he will never play again. Last week, some of them were making me crazy with their jealousy issues, so I decided it was time for a team-building project. With gardening, there doesn't have to be any competition, and the project is a lot more fun when you all work together.


Since I home school the three youngest, one of our lesson plans was how to make a garden following the square-foot garden philosophy. It is a phenomenal gardening idea that you can read more about here. First we decided how many different kinds of seeds we wanted to plant, and how many square feet we would need for each. The older two boys helped me figure out how many cubic feet of soil we would need, and then we headed off to our nearest big-box store.

All three kids became very excited at all the different possibilities for planting and I had to teach them that some seeds won't do well here in the heat, even though the photos on the seed packages look promising.

Since Caleb reads and writes Chinese, but Ben reads and writes English, Ben wrote the names in English of what we were going to plant on the little plastic markers we purchased, and then Caleb wrote the names of the vegetables on the other side in Chinese.

It has been unseasonably warm recently, and it actually felt hot the two days it took us to get our garden going. On the first day, the boys started out with sweat pants and shirts, then stripped to just their pants, and before I knew it, had decided that mixing up soil was much more fun in just their underwear. Micheline decided her swimming suit was in order, so off went her clothes and on went her suit even though we weren't planning to do any swimming.



Caleb doesn't have much patience when he is hungry or hot, and as the sun started beating down on us he kept whining, "Mama, hot!" Since we had running water to dampen our soil, I took it upon myself to cool him off with the hose. The horrified look on his face was priceless as he truly couldn't believe his mother would spray cold water on him. Of course it had to turn into a water fight, so I was glad that they weren't wearing much after all for me to have to wash when it was all over.

In square foot gardening, you don't use the regular soil you have, but rather build up an area with compost, peat moss and vermiculite. Since the three needed to be mixed thoroughly, I let the kids start mixing it up with small shovels. They weren't enjoying it much, so I showed them how to dig their hands down into the cool earth and they liked that much better. Even their hands weren't going all that deep, and that is when Ben came up with the idea of mixing it with their feet the same way people used to stomp grapes for wine.

By this time, they were in the soil up to their knees and beyond, but the whining of "I'm hot!", turned into much laughter and good times as they turned the soil with their hands and feet. Not once did I hear, "I won't play with you again", or "you're cheating!"...the words I often hear when they are competing at something. At my home, even Legos can become competitive as one vies to build a structure that he thinks will impress Mom more than his sibling's project.

Instead, with the garden, they were all surprisingly willing to work together on a project that they were all equally excited about. Stay tuned as our garden grows...

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