Child Gardening:

Gardening with Your Children

by N.A. Rogers

Gardening with children is a wonderful tool for teaching them how to enjoy vegetables and eat healthy later on in life.

Do you remember your first plant? How about a first garden? Perhaps it was a lima bean you planted in a plastic cup as part of a class project. Perhaps it was your own corner of your parent’s garden, partitioned off just for the plants that you chose. My personal garden memories include experiments with watermelon seeds, orange seeds I started in a paper cup on a window sill, and packets of all sorts of flower seeds I bought or was given willy nilly.

Instilling a love of gardening in children furnishes them with pleasure, sustenance from the healthy vegetables, and creativity and joy in growing things, often well into adulthood. There are so many garden-related activities and experiments that you can do that it's sometimes hard to pick a starting place when you introduce your kids to the love of gardening.

Packets of seeds that are labeled ‘kid gardens’ are one way to go. These packets usually contain seeds for rapid growers or "cool" plants a kid would love. You can also take a trip to the local nursery with your child and let he or she pick one or two flats of flowers already in bloom. Invest a couple dollars in a garden trowel and fork, and help your child transplant the seedlings into their very own flower bed. This is the sort of work/reward ratio that a child understands: one afternoon of digging and planting equals an immediate, visibly growing flower garden.

Once gardening has their attention, they’re ready to back to the beginning and start from seed. The best way to introduce your children to seeds is by including them in early spring seed starting. Instead of buying plants, let them plant them inside with instructions to transplant in a few weeks.

Take one from seasoned science teachers everywhere -– plant several flats in regular trays, but plant one very special ‘demonstrator’ example. Fill a glass or plastic cup with soil, poke seeds down into the dirt against the side of the glass or plastic and place it on a sunny windowsill. Your child will be fascinated by watching what happens underground as his seedlings grow –- the seed pod splitting, the roots spreading, and finally, the the first tiny shoots pressing upward toward the sunlight.

There are other very easy gardening projects that yield quick results for children, also some which are ‘winter-ready’. Here's one... cut up a potato, making sure that each chunk contains at least one eye (the little dimple in the potato that eventually becomes a sprout). Plant it in a cup of dirt with the eye facing up and watch it grow. You can do the same with an onion by burying it in soil with the crown showing. It will only be a matter of days for the shoots to turn green and begin growing.

To find more fun gardening ideas for kids, pick up a science activity book. You’ll find a plethora of growing and gardening experiments designed specifically for children, like the famous and popular "cucumber in a bottle" trick.