Gardening with Your Kids 

IDEAS FOR GARDENING WITH CHILDREN 

Open the door to science and a healthy hobby by gardening with children. Since kids are our gardening future, we need to teach them and encourage them to garden. After all, they all just naturally like to play in the dirt!

A CHILD'S FIRST GARDEN 

• Select easy-to-grow flowers and vegetables for the child’s first garden. 

• Keep it simple. 

• Make a little drawing first. 

• Help the child, or take turns with each step. 

• Even if a child doesn’t want to EAT his vegetables, he will enjoy the success! But -- he may WANT to eat them, because the child feels more "ownership" if he grew them and picked them himself. 

GARDEN PROJECT IDEAS FOR CHILDREN 

• Grow a teepee playhouse with pole beans and some long stakes. 

• Help an elderly neighbor dig a garden. 

• "Interview" a neighborhood gardener and write an article for the local paper. 

• Start a neighborhood garden club. 

• Build a birdhouse, trellis, or raised bed. 

• Plant a garden of all one color, or of all one vegetable (say, all beans). 

• Take letters of the child’s name, and plant seeds beginning with that letter. 

• Show how or help children make their own spaghetti sauce from tomatoes they grew. 

• Build a scarecrow and decorate it together. 

• Keep a garden notebook, about what you planted and when, when it bloomed, or when you picked it, what you especially liked. 

• Help a child grow the biggest pumpkin or sunflower to exhibit at county fair. 

• Help a child make a flower arrangement (preferably from flowers he grew).