Getting Kids Excited About Gardening

Show your kids just how much fun growing food can be and you’ll not only harvest luscious tomatoes, juicy watermelons and scrumptious green beans, you will have a bumper crop of fun, laughter, togetherness and learning!

Winter around my house always brought long hours of pouring over seed catalogs and dreaming about the garden Dad and I would plant in the Spring.  Some years I was more interested in this process than others, but for my dad gardening was a constant.  When our kids were little I wanted to pass along his love of gardening.  Here are some ideas to encourage that love.

Building Gardening Excitement by Including Kids In Every Step

This can start in the Winter, but if uber pre-planning isn’t for you then wait until all the wonderful  seedling varieties show up in your local garden center.  You could add to the anticipation by marking off on a calendar the days until the plants are due to arrive at the nursery or garden center.

Let Kids pick the Plants or Seeds

Make gardening a family fun time and let them be personally engaged by picking some plants (or seeds) that are theirs.  Over the years we’ve had purple beans, okra and carrots and striped tomatoes!  We discovered that we are traditionalists and returned more common colored produce, but

Let Them Get Dirty?  Encourage it!

Have them put on play clothes, their Crocs, gloves, and a happy gardening face, and let them get dirty. Without freaking out about it.  Research shows microbes found in plain old dirt are actually beneficial and at the end of the day, kids are washable.  

Show them how to prepare the garden bed, how to pull weeds, and how to break up clumps of dirt.

If you don’t have room for a garden plot, you can create a smaller version in pots that fit in on a sunny balcony or window sill.

Show them how to correctly space plants, how to gently pull plants out of their plastic containers, loosen the roots, and place them in the ground.  Let them stand in the dirt, play with earthworms, and find potato bugs.

Let them water the plants, clean up their workspace and be proud.  Let them have fun and laugh at all the dirt they are wearing.  (Gardening tip: lavender oil is great on mosquito bites!)

The Big Payoff…Eating the Harvest.

The best part ever–eating the harvest and celebrating hard work.

Instant gratification is a great thing for little gardeners, so consider grabbing  some plants like this lettuce that are basically ready to harvest immediately.

By choosing veggies to grow and making a big deal about it when it’s time to pick, clean, and eat them you encourage kids to try new things, instill pride in a job well done and give them an appreciation for how all their food is grown.

Your kids will love being able to run to their garden to pick the ripe tomatoes, grab a few sweet basil leaves and some strawberries and help make a wonderful homegrown salad and dessert.  

Let Them Count, Observe, Record, and Assess Progress.

Keeping track of which plants do well in certain conditions, keeping track of harvest, and assessing the taste of the veggies in your garden is a super way of taking gardening a step further for kids.  This can be done in simple charts, on notepaper, or in a spiral ‘gardening notebook’.

This year, we’re going to keep track of our garden with a Garden Plan and Harvest Record, and it serves a few purposes:

• help track of the plants that we are cultivating this year
• keep track of the weather this summer
• count the number of plants we yield
• evaluate the taste of each plant

We’re using a Garden Plan and Harvest Record this year for two reasons:

1. We had no record of which tomatoes we loved and which we didn’t from last year’s garden; and
2. I’m hoping that this will be something that Owen likes–the record-keeping, counting, and assessing.

I’m hoping this may renew his relationship with nature.

One part of this chart is a record of the plants we’re using this year, the Garden Plan, which we completed today. It simply numbers each plant and notes its type and variety.

The other part is a Harvest Record that we’ll fill out each week of the summer.

The Harvest Record will record the week’s weather very simply by circling the weather icon that we experienced: big sun (for hot and sunny); smaller sun (warm and sunny); tiny sun; cloud; rain cloud; and lightning for stormy weather.  My kids are huge weather fans, so I’m hoping they dig this part.

The last thing the Harvest Record will do is keep track of taste: this week, do we like the veggie or not? We’ll note it simply by circling the smiley face or the frown face.

We’ve never done this before, so I’m hoping the kids are into it.  Sticking it to a clipboard that we will keep hanging in the kitchen will, I hope, remind us to use it. I’m also hoping that at the end of the season, we can look back at our weekly Harvest Records and determine which plants we want to use again; it can be a cool synthesis activity to look back at the weather, our harvest, and the plant information to figure out what made some work and not others.

And that’s it–just a few ways that kids can help with the gardening no matter their age. Whether it’s helping pick out plants, reminding us to water them, helping pick cherry tomatoes off the vine, or counting and eating, kids–families–can benefit in so many ways by gardening together.

Download the Garden Planner and Harvest Record Here

Other Great Summer Ideas for You and Your Kids

• 150 Fun Boredom Busters for Kids to Do

• Geocaching, a Modern Treasure Hunt

• Backyard Chickens