Please share with me things from your childhood which were key to getting you into gardening

[Liara]

My 6yo ds1 is totally and completely plant mad. Half our days out are to gardens (would be more if it was up to him), he has raided my bookshelves for books on plants (preferably bulbs) and spends a large proportion of his time talking about the grand designs he wants to plant up.

I want to encourage and support his interest, but I worry that repeated failure will just depress him and put him off, which would be a real shame. I never had any involvement with gardening when I was a child, and though I love it now I have a pretty high failure rate.

We have a very large garden but we are in the Mediterranean area, and cannot possibly water ornamental plants beyond a little to get them established.

I would love to hear others' best memories of gardening with their parents/on their own for the first time.

Planting lots of fruit and veg with my parents - especially pea pods and strawberries!

Thanks! We do that already, he has worked on the veg plot with his dad since he was tiny. It's only recently that he's become interested in ornamental plants, which is kind of my department so I'm feeling the weight of responsibility!

Tomatoes. My grandpa taught me to pinch out side shoots and let me eat all the 'baby' tomatoes. I was also fascinated by the way he grew melons suspended in my grandma's old tights.

My mum bought me some large pots and helped me choose packets of hardy annuals to sow in them. You can't go wrong with things like Poached Egg plant, Baby Blue Eyes, Scarlet Flax, Calendula, Nigella etc. Pots are easy for kids to water too.

I need to hear more about this melons in tights business!

I remember my Gran giving us pumpkin plants every July which we had to tend and grow until October before we could get our hands on them for Halloween.
We used to plan all the different pictures we were going to carve in them, but ultimately it used to end up the usual scary face.
I cant grow them in my garden they just die but I still love to carve pumpkins.

Fruit trees are great too. I love making Jam now, again my Grandmother used to do that with me as a child too.

My Garden is dreadful, everything dies including the grass. Ive lost just over half the lawn in the back garden this year, its just shrivelled up and died. We have awful soil. Dandelions grow though, just nothing else.

Does he have his own patch? I still look at my patch of garden at my mums house fondly, some of the perennials are still there (she paved over my brother's patch

Herbs are good for the ornamental/veg crossover. Otherwise take a tip I once heard on Gardeners Question time in relation to a similar question.

'take a good look at what's in your neighbours gardens, then plant the same things but give them a little more food, and a little more water, and your garden will soon be the envy of the street'

I had my own small patch as a child. Grew mostly radishes and carrots I think. It has to be a good piece of land where things have a reasonable chance of growing. Some of hte wild flower mixes would be good - they seemed to have survived and flourished under my tough love regime this year.

I also loved doing my Brownie gardeners badge as a child. I had to look after my bit of garden and then someone from the horticultural club came round and talked to me about it. I learned loads!

Melons in tights: My Grandpa saved the seeds from melons they'd bought to eat, planted them in pots and grew on the plants in his greenhouse, training them up the walls. When they produced flowers, he did the pollination by paintbrush thing then supported the weight of the resultant melons by inserting them into the cut-off feet of my Grandma's tights, tied to the roof to stop the stems breaking. As a small child I marvelled at the sight of this.

As soon as he is old enough get him some tools - real ones, not the cheap crap that is punted out as kids gardening tools. The stuff supposedly for kids just bends and breaks and isn't suitable for the task in hand.

Buy him real tools and teach him how to use them safely and care for them. It will be a real investment for you both.

I have to admit I thought gardening was quite boring when I was younger, am definitely a middle age convert. However we probably have a similar environment to you (semi arid). So I'd give your son a patch of his own and then look together for what grows most frequently in your local area and suggest plants that are really well adapted. I have recently decided only to plant very cold hardy drought resistant plants as my death rate has been really high, and not to do annuals as I just seem to bump them off!

If you are visiting gardens do you get the opportunity to talk to the owners/gardeners? Lots of people really warm to young children being interested in their hobby and could give him lots of good ideas.

We do really well with hardy geraniums, tulips, allium, lavender, sedums of all sorts and for some reason peonies. I also use soaker hoses for the first few seasons, as they are easy to tunr on and don't use too much water, but am aiming for xeroscaping as much as possible.

I hated gardening as a kid! What got my interest was herbs. They seemed semi-magical to me with a culinary, medicinal, cosmetic etc use.

Herbs good for the Med would be the ones that grow their naturally! Lavender, Rosemary, Thyme, Marjoram, Hyssop, Verbena - so many orginate in the Med.

In fact that's probably a good tip for your DS - grow what is native to the area. Look in those gardens you visit and see what is abundant.

• grow there naturally

-stories about botany bay and bringing back plants from far off places always appealed to me.
-drawing flowers and their leaves in botany lessons was very pleasant
-watching a seed germinate.
-watching roots form from a bulb or cutting in one of those transparent vase thingies.
-layering a plant and then watching it take root
-growing a daffodil bulb in a pot which was kept in the garage over winter and then taken out in february with an astonishing emergence of green foliage.
-growing marigolds to make into garlands
-herbs, grown and then harvested and tied into bunches and dried upside down as if home was a medieval apothecary's dwelling.

LottienHuw - that sounds wonderful. Unfortunately we have failed to manage pumpkins so far.

thisisMummypig he has a little patch where he has planted bulbs he has dug up from the fields and scattered hardy annuals, I have also built him a raised bed which is yet to be planted - it is this I am wondering about now. He wants everything in every plant book in it, most particularly alliums (but out of around 100 alliums I planted 7 years ago, only 3 are still alive!)

Rhubarbgarden the melons in tights is genius! Ds has decided he wants to grow watermelons up the fence of the hen coop. I tried explaining but he's not having it, we might have a go with small melons next year. We usually just let them trail on the ground.

Cutteduppear he just uses our tools, and is pretty confident with them.

nooka we usually do talk to the gardeners when we visit gardens, but most of them are fairly intensively irrigated, so there is a limit to how useful it is!

bunchoffives I really do try to garden with my environment, but ds dreams of clematis with flowers the size of dinnerplates. We have all the herbs here, he just totally takes them for granted (we live in the middle of a mediterranean forest, so all the things you mentioned grow wild all around)

funnyperson forcing daffodils is a great idea! Thanks for that. I'll try that in the winter.

Thanks all for sharing your memories!

watching a bean germinate in a jam jar

having a my own area to make mud pies

easy flowers

baby tomatoes as someone esle has also said

sunflowers

My own Dcs seemed to like helping me to create baskets and containers (instant effect helped) and also planting mustard and cress on blotting paper!

Also courgettes would grow well in the raised bed? Mine certainly do here (NW England!)

And really tall beans up bean-poles?

Yes to mud pies. I am eternally grateful to my mother for letting us children make mud pies. This simple and subversive childhood experience has kept me eternally grounded.

Oh dear -eternally twice! I mean I enjoyed it. My children had a posh handmade boat shaped sandpit which is not the same because not as messy or dirty. The mess and dirt is the charm of the mud pie.

Every time I plant a plant it is really just grown up mud pie technique.

How lovely that your son is already a keen gardener at 6 years old!

My mum had a fantastic garden, we all had a tiny plot as children, I remember being really proud that one of my sunflowers grew really tall

Now I live in an appartment with a balcony, so have lots of plants on it. I have aloe vera too (inside in the winter), I'm sure they would grow well in the med.

My sister lives in Spain and has a fantastic plumbago - lovely blue flowers - there, maybe an idea?

Thank you!

Sorry, what are mud pies? Is that just playing in the mud in a really messy way? Because if so then I've unknowingly done that one very well .

Courgettes we already grow in the veggie plot, which is absolutely his fiefdom (with his father as manual labourer). This raised bed is for his very own ornamental garden. He seems to have elaborate ideas about bulbs in complicated patterns which I fear are doomed to disappoint, so I am fishing for ideas that will give him pleasure instead which I can try and subtly steer him towards.

Sunflowers is a brilliant idea. Do they need a lot of water?

I'll look into plumbago, but not sure it is fully hardy? Our winters are bitterly cold.

Oh, and nooka how exactly do you manage to pull off peonies? What varieties, and where do you grow them?

well, you need a bucket and spade. water. earth. plate perhaps.

you dig up the earth, put it in the bucket, mix it with the required amount of water, turn it upside down on the plate, offer it to siblings possibly decorated with stones and pebbles. pointless childish messy activity.

Sounds fun. I don't think they've done quite that, but they did have an attempt at making pots like the romans did. Sadly they cracked as they dried.

Will suggest mud pies next rainy day, but I suspect it might be slightly too sedate for mine. They tend to go for running full speed through puddles.

the thing is mud pies are not educational. or intellectual. or technically difficult. they do not promote child development in any way. they are a messy subversive play activity. the fun element is dubious. they are not designed for mumsnet readers. my mum being a phd in economics from the world renowned lse and myself having a few degrees, we both agree that mud pies are essential to the sanity of the children of the stiff upper lipped. bringing the romans into it is too brainy.