Add a Little Dirt to Playtime

It's a cold winter, and cabin fever is raging. Kids, especially, get a little stir-crazy as daylight hours begin to stretch but warming temperatures lag behind. Gardeners start looking for favorite signs of spring, such as swelling buds or swales of mud.

My sister Anne, a play therapist at the Family Room, a parent-child center in Burlington, Vt., has a bag of tricks for getting young children through times like these, when the groundhog has come out of his hole and huffed, "So much for global warming." She assembles the rectangular plastic, lidded boxes in which salad greens are sold and fills them with several inches of potting soil. Then she gives the children seeds to sprout on the soil's moistened surface: mung beans, sunflowers, alfalfa, radishes, lentils or peas, all of which germinate fast.

"It's like a little farm," she explains. "We could sow them on paper towels instead, but they love washing the dirt off the sprouts, or harvesting them with scissors. And they eat them with their lunch, something they would never do if sprouts had just been served to them." She suggests having children grow a box of wheat grass for pet cats, who'll welcome a spring tonic.

She goes on to describe another project whose success took her by surprise: "We sowed a large planter with grass seed. Just plain grass. They played with their tiny lawn for hours, put little plastic animals in it, told stories about them, created an outdoor world."

Where Anne lives, on the chilly shores of Lake Champlain, she discovered that people were socializing in a greenhouse at the nearby Gardener's Supply Co., which sells plants, tools and gardening paraphernalia. "They were bringing cups of tea and sitting there, or meeting friends, instead of at a cafe," she says. The sight of green leaves and the smell of earth are soothing, medicinal.

Play therapy for preschoolers and play therapy for gardeners are markedly similar. Serious food-growers are already getting their fingers a little dirty with crops that must be started way ahead, such as onions, alpine strawberries and asparagus (yes, you can grow it from seed). Perennial herbs such as thyme, sage, oregano and marjoram are also best sown now, to have good-sized seedlings ready when the ground has warmed up. It's about time to sow head lettuce indoors, too, and if your garden is all prepared and ready to go, you can direct-sow lettuce and peas as soon as the ground has thawed.

A vague sense of urgency in spring is a common symptom for gardeners. Treat it or channel it by making sure you've ordered all your seeds. Find a greenhouse or botanical garden nearby and take a few catalogues with you, along with your tea.