*This is a guest post*
Gardening is an excellent activity for families to enjoy together. It teaches kids how living things grow, encourages them to like fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables, and is a great way to learn about responsibility and caretaking. Plus, it’s fun. Whether you plan an acre’s worth of veggies or maintain a small window box of flowers, here are five basic gardening tasks your kids will love, and you might just find they save you some work, too.
Preparing the Garden
Ask children to help plan the garden so they feel involved from the start. Let them help choose a plot of land or some containers and ask each child to select his own vegetables or flowers to plant. Children will also enjoy picking up sticks and raking leaves to prepare an area for gardening. Make this chore into a game to see who can collect the most sticks or remove the most rocks from the ground. Ask kids to gather gardening supplies and carry debris to the bin or compost pile to keep them moving and involved and save your grown-up legs some walking.
Digging in the Dirt
Most children dig in the dirt for fun anyway. Why not put their skills to work in the garden? Equip younger children with safe, plastic, kid-sized tools to avoid injuries from metal rakes and spades and let them dig right in. If their attention wanders and they start making mud pies before there’s a hole for every bulb or seed, try asking them to imagine you’re excavating for dinosaur bones or digging for buried treasure to keep them motivated.
Pulling Weeds
What seems like a chore to adults is an exciting game to children. Teach kids to recognize and pull weeds to help your garden flourish. Supervise younger children to be sure that only undesirables are uprooted. Have a contest to see whose weed pile is the biggest, or save some of the pulled weeds with the most interesting leaves or blossoms to study and identify like scientists or to use in arts and crafts projects.
Watering
What child doesn’t love to play with water? Let the kids get a little wet and help sustain the garden, too. Kid-sized watering cans cut down on spills (but not necessarily on-purpose soakings), and hoses and sprinklers can be lots of fun. When the plants have had their fill, let children pretend to be the flowers in the garden, standing in the sunlight with their arms up like petals, and give them a little sprinkle of their own.
Harvesting
The most important part of gardening with children is showing them how their hard work pays off by letting them help cut fresh flowers or harvest veggies when the time is right. They’ll feel a real sense of pride in their accomplishment and maybe, just maybe, even deign to eat some of the healthy produce that they’ve grown.
Written by Jamie Lovelock
Jamie runs a landscaping business. Jamie gets a lot of inspirations from his dad who is a gardening enthusiast. Jamie loves DIY at home and spends lots of time in his workshop when he’s not in the backyard.
