I think we put far too much interest in trying to get ten to 20 year olds interested in gardening. I think you should do everything you can to try and get them interested up to the age of 10.

Wonder works better than willpower

There's something counterintuitive here that most parenting advice gets backwards. We spend our energy trying to convince teenagers that gardening is cool, or we wait until someone's burned out from work to suddenly gift them a plot. But the window that actually matters isn't about being trendy or having time—it's about wonder. A six-year-old digging in soil isn't thinking about whether this is fashionable. They're experiencing something primal: a seed becoming something alive because of what they did.

Once you're past that early curiosity window, something shifts. The teenage brain gets more self-conscious, more efficient, more skeptical about activities that don't immediately pay off. By then, you're swimming upstream. But if you've already let a kid feel that direct connection between their hands, the earth, and growth, you've planted something real. They might not garden as a teenager, and that's fine. The point isn't to create a gardener at 14—it's to make sure they experienced the thing itself when their mind was still open to magic.

It's a reminder that so much of what sticks with us isn't learned through persuasion as adults. It's experienced young, when we're still capable of genuine surprise.