Tips for Gardening with the Kids

Sage advice from Stephanie Baker, Ready to Grow Gardens

If you’re looking for some tips on ways to get your kids involved in the gardening fun, here are a few ideas that we incorporate with our gardening at school programs.

• Let them touch everything! Sensory experiences are all around you in a garden, so engage your kids by having them touch and smell the soil, investigate the texture of the seeds while holding them in their hand, and look and listen for bugs. Kid bug detectives are the best!

• Have your children draw pictures and use rulers to measure your crops’ growth and then record them in a special garden journal.

• Put your kids in charge of watering and thinning. Watering with a cute watering can is the perfect child-sized job, giving them a sense of ownership with something that is very hard to mess up. At about two weeks of growth, thinning your root crop seedlings to four to six inches apart is a great fine-motor activity for little hands.

• Kids are fantastic at looking for bugs! They have an eye for finding cabbage loopers that are bright green just like the leaves they munch on.

• Kids love to write stories about their vegetable friends.

• Keep kids involved from seed planting all the way to harvest and cooking with the family.