Having fun in the garden with your kids and letting them have their own garden spot is one of the best ways to share your love of gardening. How about letting them pick out their own seeds for a summer or fall garden? Fun and easy seeds like sunflowers, gourds, and zinnias are always a hit with kids. Gardening and involving them in the whole process, is much more likely to give you an enthusiastic participant. You never know when you’ll find a huge tomato worm like the one below!
Make it a point to take advantage of “gardening moments” with your kids a few times every week.
This can be as easy as walking outside after a rain to enjoy God’s creation. While you walk, you can talk to your child about the life giving water that our Lord supplies to the plants and to us. who wouldn’t love to see the miracle of a tiny seed growing into a giant sunflower?
Planting a butterfly garden can be easy and fun too. Black swallowtails love zinnias!
To get you started, below are some guidelines for what your child’s ability is at different ages.
Stages and Ages for Kids Gardening
The first thing you can do when you want to garden with children, is to show them how much you love it by doing something in the garden each day yourself. Even if it’s just 5 minutes of pulling weeds. You may want to take them with you to visit local gardens in your area.
The second thing you can do is to get your children to help you with some of the chores. Let them do some of the “fun stuff” like planting and harvesting. Always keep in mind their capabilities and attention span and realize that you will probably have to finish the job yourself.
Here are a few more guidelines that I found at www.kidsgardeining.org that you might find helpful to begin the process of gardening with your children. This kids gardening website is an excellent site with lots of resources, tips, and ideas.
Preschool, Ages 3-4 Don’t expect too much. Have fun moving mulch or pulling a few weeds. Tell them stories about your favorite childhood memories of being in the garden, or show them what your favorite flower is. Reading books like Peter Rabbit out in the garden is a good beginning too At this stage, kids gardening is more about them watching and being with you rather than actually having them accomplish anything.
Kindergarten, Age 5 At this age, kids gardening projects are about making forts, tree houses, secret gardens, or their own garden. One fun project for this age group is to help them make a tepee out of long stakes. Let your child help plant beans that will climb up the polls all summer. What better way to encourage them to eat their green beans!
Elementary Ages 6-7 At this age, you can incorporate reading and math skills with your kid’s gardening projects. You can let them help you measure out the garden area you are going to plant, or maybe they can read the planting instructions on the seed packets to you and then you can help them plant the seeds. For this age group, gardening is still about the doing and not the end results so chill out and have some fun!
Middle School and High School This is when the emphasis shifts from doing to doing well (you hope!) At this age, you are no longer at the kid’s gardening stage. They have now entered the young adult stage.
Your budding young adult may like to design their own garden on graph paper, or they may want to organize a class project for their community. Even working at a local garden center or for a landscaper may be something they enjoy.
At the high school level, your child may choose to do independent studies in horticulture at a community college, as our child did, and eventually decide to pursue a career in horticulture. That’s how Alfred got started gardening and hasn’t stopped since. He’s now working with his dad in our landscaping business, Acer Landscape Services.
No matter what your child’s bent is, gardening with your him/her can be a fun and rewarding experience for them as well as you. Who knows, maybe you’ll find that you have a “budding” landscaper, architect, nature photographer or painter in your home.
Happy Gardening!
