X-post: Poisonous plants and childcare

 
The giant-leafed weed we know as the castor oil plant and find growing on
disturbed wasteland -- is it that the self same plant from which castor
oil is commercially extracted?
--
John Savage                   (my news address is not valid for email)

 g'day amanda,

sometimes i wonder how we made it as kids hey??

guess the safest way is to replace living plants with fake plastic
ones, almost no worries then, i say almost because as i said a long
time ago somewhere "it doesn't matter how fool proof you make it -
there is always a fool out there how can circumvent any system", the
only way to make anything fool proof is to remove the fool.

so fake plants still look the safest bet, once you sign off on
something you may be where the litigation buck stops.



On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:03:42 GMT, "FlowerGirl"

snipped
With peace and brightest of blessings,

len & bev

--
"Be Content With What You Have And
May You Find Serenity and Tranquillity In
A World That You May Not Understand."

http://www.lensgarden.com.au/

 G'day Amanda

I have to agree with Len when he said...sometimes I wonder how we made
it as kids hey??

Everything (and I mean EVERYthing) seems to require some official
statement these days. What has happened to 'teaching' kids about plants,
and other 'dangerous' things?  My son (now adult with his own kids) was
highly allergic to bee stings as a child and the school wouldn't allow
him to go on excursions, or play on the grass playground, because there
were trees/grass/etc there and he 'might' get stung....and die!!
Therefore he was forced to play on the concrete section of the
playground with absolutely NO shade trees and hardly any friends because
they were all down the back playing on the grass.  In the end we were
sorry we had chosen to inform the school of his allergy because he was
victimised.  He knew the procedure to follow if he was stung, knew where
to contact us at all times and to allow him to go on school excursions
(after the initial banning) I used to go as teacher's aide along with
the injection kit in my bag.

Besides growing seeds, one of his hobbies was keeping 'live'
spiders....at 3yo he had a Red Back, Sydney Funnel Web, White Tail
Spider and too many Huntsman's to count, all LIVE.  Mind you, he didn't
have enough space to house the Huntsman's so they wandered around his
room, sometimes venturing out, but would always return where they knew
they would be handfed with fresh flies and other insects. I used to get
into strife if I used flyspray in the house, because these flies could
not be fed to his 'mates'.  For his 4th birthday I tried to buy a Spider
Identification book that was in child's language.....no such creature!!
  The only available book was full of language that he could not yet read.

At home, he had his own garden...from age 3 and he always played in the
yard where we had lots of trees/flowers/vegies/etc along with a
Callistemon that attracted swarming bees.....an apiarist friend used to
regularly call twice a week to collect the swarms, sometimes more often.
  Now if we had been 'over' cautious I'm not sure what would have
happened.  Sure, his condition was life threatening, but you can't wrap
kids in cotton wool as they usually choke on it!!  BTW, we were not
neglectful parents either but didn't carry our concerns to the extreme,
which I feel happens within lots of areas these days.  Don't let the
child to this, and don't let the child do that....it makes me wonder if
there will be any well adjusted adults in years to come.

Teach them the right and wrong way to handle plants and I'm sure this is
more likely to get them interested in gardening, than sitting around
with a long list of plant names that they can't identify.  Start them
with a succulent/cactus garden, then progress to herbs and vegies...they
love growing what they eat for dinner.

Teaching is the best protection......imho!!
Bronwyn ;-)



len garden wrote:

 yes bronwyn,

educatiuon is the best protection, guess nowadays too many parents
don't have enough common sense or knowledge themsleves to be raising a
family with?

did you see the segment on a current affair program last night where a
volunteer older man at a school was known to the kids as "poppy" and
some "do gooder" complained as they saw it could lead their child into
danger??!! just an indictment of our society at present people don't
want to take the responsibility of raising and educating their own
kids to the "rights and wrongs", just look around our communities it's
all there to be seen, disenfranchised kids causing all sorts of
problems.

we used to have all sorts of indoor plants when our kids where babies
lots of them know for their toxisity we where able to teach our kids
not to touch certain things and that is how they learnt, no need for
heavy hand, even now our 1 year old granddaughter if she goes near
anything when crawling around we tell her no so she moves on, no play
pen here to keep her contained, they don't learn that way.

maybe some parents don't credit their kids with basic inteliigence?




snipped
With peace and brightest of blessings,

len & bev

--
"Be Content With What You Have And
May You Find Serenity and Tranquillity In
A World That You May Not Understand."

http://www.lensgarden.com.au/

 

For a daycare centre you are talking about children between 0-5 years of
age.  While you can educate a 3 year old not to eat the shrubbery, it's
kind of hard to do with a 1 year old who could toddle over and start
chewing on the foliage before anyone noticed.  TBH, I am kind of
surprised that a check for poisonous plants isn't done as part of the
licensing assessment of a premises for child care purposes.

My kids have a variety of plants and trees (and related insects,
spiders, snails, etc) in their yard and we have never had a problem with
it, but I would certainly never purposefully plant something poisonous
in my yard.  My kids might be safe, but I couldn't be sure visiting kids
would know enough to avoid dangerous plants.

eggs.