Gardening with kids can produce a bumper crop of benefits. You’ll get vegetables or flowers, while your child will learn a bushel of life lessons. Here’s how children can benefit from gardening and how you can put them to work.
Life lessons in the garden patch
Gardening with kids teaches them many lessons, including the following.
- How to plan: Gardening requires forethought. Involve your children in choosing a spot for your garden and the plants you will grow there. Let them help design the vegetable and flower bed layout and arrange plants to complement each other. These experiences in planning will set them on a path toward good decision-making.
- A good work ethic: Daily tasks like planting, feeding, watering and weeding are essential for healthy plants. Allowing your children to help with or be in charge of these duties will show them that hard work is necessary for a bountiful harvest.
- A sense of ownership: Allow kids to help establish and cultivate a garden, and they’ll see what their efforts can produce.
- Science education: Gardening helps children learn about plant life, seed germination, photosynthesis, the importance of hydration, and pollination by bees and butterflies.
- Food Supply: Children who help grow vegetables and fruit will learn how food gets to their kitchen table. After their small-scale farming efforts, they’ll never see the grocery the same way.
Getting started gardening with kids
Let children ages two to six perform simple garden tasks. Provide them with child-sized implements: gloves, a hand trowel, a rake (choose metal over flimsier plastic), a watering can, and a hat for shade. Assist them in planting their first seeds or bedding plants in various bright colors such as reds, blues, yellows, and oranges. For example, marigolds, sunflowers, tomatoes, or orange peppers will delight them. Let young children water under your supervision, and help them stake tomato or bean plants and harvest vegetables.
Children between six and twelve can handle some tasks independently once you instruct them. Involve them in decisions about what to grow. Explain how to lay out the garden, properly space plantings, schedule waterings, keep weeds under control, and when to harvest.
Teenagers can handle even more independence. Assign them space in the garden and let them do as they please.
Related – How to Create the Perfect Indoor Kitchen Garden
