Activities to get Kids excited about Gardening

Before having kids gardening wasn’t even on my radar. Despite growing up on a vegetable farm, it certainly didn’t leave me with any green fingers. I struggled to keep a house plant alive when I left home! But having kids tends to change your perspective on many things and gardening has been one of them. Before kids I wouldn’t have spent much time in the garden at all, expect for the odd BBQ or to pull the very biggest weeds out! But now I like to get my kids active outside in the fresh air as much as possible, it is becoming more important to have something nice to look at whilst we are out playing.

Make miniature gardens – we spent a lovely afternoon collecting flower heads along with sticks and stones to go into my children’s individual miniature flower gardens.

Plant Sunflowers – we had excellent fun last year with our “Sunflower Growing Competition” and we will be repeating this again this year. We have already planted out our seeds indoors and they are growing really well so far. In the next few weeks we’ll be planting them out into the garden and the kids will be assigned to an area each to look after and we’ll see who can grow the biggest flower this year! We had some peeping over the fence last year.

Grow Cress Heads – Every child should grow a cress head at least once. My eldest son has been planting seeds out in school,so Freddie and Bella wanted to have a go at home as well. We re-used some yoghurt pots for our planters and added on some googly eyes and funny faces with a marker to turn them into “Cress Monsters”. They are ideal for young kids to start off with, as they grow so fast germinating within a couple of days of planting them. I’m hoping to get them to try some in their school lunch sandwiches this week.

I am still very much a beginner in the garden, but I am eager to learn. I started slowly last year planting out a few bulbs and bedding plants and we are reaping the benefits of these now spring is here. Yes, the daffodils have taken a bit of bashing from the kids bikes and balls, but most of them have survived!

We also built a couple of raised vegetable beds in our back garden last year and the kids took great delight in helping Daddy shovel the soil in (there was a lot!). They then went along to help choose which seeds to buy and helped sow them in the ground. They were then given responsibility in helping with the watering duties and being on the lookout for any new shoots growing. There was great excitement when each new crop popped their heads above ground. We even managed to get them to try most of the produce we grew as well, which was a big motivating factor in getting them involved in the first place.

We are hoping to up our game with the vegetable beds this year and try and grow a few more things. We have already set our potatoes and sown some radish seeds into the vegetable beds. I have also grown some cucumber, pepper, tomato and courgette plants from seed inside which we will be planting out once the last chance of a frost has been and gone. We then have carrot and pea seeds ready to go straight into the beds as well over the coming weeks.