It’s that time of the year when you may want to consider starting a garden, and you should! It’s true that gardening with small children in tow can have its challenges. But gardening also provides virtually limitless learning opportunities for children and adults alike, so here are five easy tips for planning a garden with your kiddos:
1. Start Small & Keep It Simple
Gardening does not need to be done with a lot of land, since many vegetables and herbs can be successfully grown in containers. For those just starting out, try a small garden with just a few easy-to-grow vegetables. Keeping it simple will be less stressful for you and will help ensure some early growing success for your garden.
2. Use a Kid-Friendly Layout
Some kid-friendly garden designs include: raised beds or containers, square-foot gardening, or planting in rows that allow plenty of walking room in-between. If possible, designate a small area of the garden for your child to experiment with his or her own mini-garden, and to grow whatever he or she would like.
3. Give Kids Tools of Their Own
Consider buying some kid-sized gardening tools to further encourage children to have an active role in the garden. Many can be found inexpensively in stores like Target or even the dollar store. Some tools you may want to start out with include: kid-sized gardening gloves, shovel, cultivator, and watering can.
4. Choose Plants that Grow Easily
Picking plants that grow easily allows kids to have the joy of success, which makes it more likely they’ll catch the gardening bug. These vegetables, flowers, and herbs are great for those who are new to gardening: lettuce, sunflowers, basil, peas, carrots, marigolds, cherry (or grape) tomatoes, parsley, and onions.
5. Decorate the Garden
Another way to include the kids in this early stage of gardening is to decorate the garden with seed markers, colorful banners, or other garden crafts. One year, we made a special garden banner to welcome all of our plants and make our garden fun and colorful. If you’d like to try this fun and easy project with your own children, the instructions are can be found here.
http://innerchildfun.com/2010/06/easy-garden-welcome-banner.html
Have fun gardening with your kids!!
Valerie Deneen is the author of Inner Child Fun, a blog filled with inexpensive craft and activity ideas, money saving tips, and all around good times on a budget. She loves sewing, digital photography, organic tea, dark chocolate, gardening, clipping coupons, bourbon, knitting, graphic design, and cooking. Valerie is a graduate of Bucknell University, a former senior software engineer, and now a stay-at-home mom.
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[...] Gardening with the littles [...]
Being an organic gardener doesn’t require a huge amount of space. Even living in an apartment with a small patio or porch you can accomplish container and small space gardening to grow your organic produce.
Thanks for sharing. Love my Wacom!
My three little bugs and I planted carrots, green beans, sugar snap peas and beets in the past among other things. They loved to go in the garden and pull up a carrot or grab a green bean on their way to play in the back yard. My 2 year old even ate the raw beets with me. Look forward to planting some yummy stuff this year too.
Great tips! I love using a raised garden bed for gardening with kids – helps keep the weeds out and it’s so easy for them to see where their garden is and control what grows in it!
These are really super ideas. What a great way to involve the family and get kids into organic gardening from a young age.
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[...] guest posting for my friends at Stonyfield today to share tips for organic gardening with your [...]
A tip that worked for me: Plant a green bean teepee together — 3 tall stakes tied together in teepee formation with twine wound around horizontally at 1-foot intervals. You can do the whole project with your child, from starting the seeds to building the teepee. Leave a “door” for your kid to crawl inside, and let them know they can pick and eat whenever they want while they’re playing in their teepee. My chicken-nuggets-only 4-year-old is now 22 — and still loves her green beans. Raw!
Penny, we love this idea! Thanks for sharing!
Sunflowers certainly give a BANG for your buck! Goose and I planted some flower seeds this morning, can’t wait to see what they do.
[...] be found inexpensively in stores like Target or even the dollar store. … Read the original: 5 Easy Tips for Organic Gardening with Kids « Stonyfield Farm … ← Rare and Exotic Garden Perennials for Landscape Planting by … New Biodegradable [...]