What happens when you have kids gardening? It can get messy, chaotic, and maybe even frustrating. But, it’s also insanely fun, interesting, and growth building. It may even increase mental health, boost focus, and, best of all, provide nutritious food to your kitchen table.
Gardening is a fun pastime that can foster a sense of well being, accomplishment, and wonder at the natural world. There is a mystery in placing seeds in barren, cool, soil and watching for the green leaves to sprout with new life. Gardening is beneficial for those of any age, as is the fresh air and outdoor movement. Kids can get involved in gardening quite early in life, toddlers can learn about strawberries, and older kids can learn about new vegetables and the seeds to grow them.
If you don’t have garden space, you can garden in containers, with a hydroponic system, or even as part of a community garden. My granddaughter helps her mom replant and care for their small hydroponic garden system during the winter, and loves watching the plants get bigger each day. Community gardens and Learning Gardens are areas where you and your children can have opportunity to help, learn, and observe, they are usually run by volunteers, so ask around your community to locate one near you. Learning gardens especially can be a wealth of information.
Don’t rely on just a school garden for your kid’s to learn about gardening. School gardens have to work with short growing season, or early growing season plants, paired with really late season ones like pumpkins. And, it’s not quite the same as your own plant, even if it is spinach.
What Age do Kids start Gardening?
Around grade one, many schools do small projects with seeds, usually beans, sunflower, or peas, to show the mystery of how seeds grow. If you homeschool, kids can start being involved with gardening as soon as they can toddle, or even in a baby carrier. A three year old can ID dandelions and pick their flowers for salad, while learning and absorbing information on the rest of the garden. A five year old can have a small container garden to monitor and water themselves, I’d avoid an in-ground space initially as it’s hard to keep up with weeding before age ten or so. By age ten a child can have their own garden space, and be involved with choosing seeds, new varieties, and maybe even new vegetables.
How to get Kid’s Gardening?
Start with the seed catalogues in December and January. There is something magical in looking through a gardening catalogue, dreaming about what could be grown next summer. My second to youngest granddaughter loves looking through the colorful seed catalogues, she especially likes the flower images and the fruit images. Next year, she’ll get to pick a flower for her own little container garden, one that I know is easy to grow and will grow well in our summer, and we’ll see how the gardening seed grows for her. Older children can pick seeds, or come with you to pick plants at garden centers.
With older kids, you can get them involved with picking unique varieties of favorite vegetables. If your kid loves carrots, have them look at all the various colored carrots, with interesting names, and chose one to try to grow. It can also help with expanding food horizons. Radishes are another fun beginner veggie to try.
Admittedly harvesting is the most fun part of gardening, so invite your child to help with harvesting. Kid gardeners also love flowers, varying textures and scents in the garden. So, red lettuce, purple basil, or purple podded peas and bright Easter egg radishes might be up their alley.
Teaching Respect for the Earth:
Something that often happens naturally, or with just a bit of encouragement, is that kids gardening naturally helps them develop a respect for the earth, insects, and small animals that live there. Knowing that earthworms help build soil, that bees pollinate plants and help make seeds, that rolly pollies help break down decaying matter, and how it works together to make healthy food and grow strong plants builds respect for the earth’s systems. Especially the ecosystem in general.
Gardens also give a good opportunity to do garden crafts, reusing and recycling materials, and gives kids an opportunity to practice their ingenuity, problem solving skills, and even critical thinking skills.ย Seedling pots from recycled materials, like newspaper for example, can help them get involved early in the season. Unusual planters, like old boots or shoes, or planting in cups with broken handles can also be fun.
We often repurpose old branches, untreated wood, lattices, and other climbable structures for trellises, and to grow vineing plants on. You can even use plants like beans to build garden hide-outs, sunflowers work too. Even if you have a small garden the opportunities to be inventive and reuse what you have on hand are great for kids to be involved in as your gardening projects change and evolve. Actually, a small garden is better than a large one for inventive opportunities, like growing plants upward that normally sprawl outward.
Unusual Gardening:
You can also do various types of indoor gardening with kids, even if you don’t have a green thumb. Things like microgreens, hydroponic cherry tomatoes, or even sprouts, don’t need major sunshine, plots of land, and can even be grown while there’s snow on the ground! And, they give a quick harvest, which is perfect for short attention spans. Micro-greens can be ready to nibble in as little as a week.
You can also do herbs indoors. I love growing a small hydroponic purple ball basil plant over the winter, the tiny leaves are packed with flavor and a brilliantly dark purple. They have great taste, and other herbs can be grown in the same way, even mint. And it doesn’t take much patience or practice, to get results with hydroponic herbs or veggies. It can also fit on an apartment windowsill, which is beneficial if you have a small space.
Back to You:
Does your child garden with you? Have you gotten your kids gardening?
What’s the craziest plant your child has wanted to grow? My (now adult) daughter started with wanting to grow different types of corn, cucumbers like Dragon’s Egg cucumber, and carrots like Purple Dragon. Now, she’s an adult with her own garden and an obsession with trying to germinate every type of seed she comes across (Dragon fruit seeds? sure, let’s grow a cacti!).
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