Cheap and Easy Summer Fun: Plant Flower Boxes with Your Children

Summer is moving in fast and in a few weeks our children will be out of school. If you are like me then you are looking for cheap and easy ways to keep your kids occupied. Something that is fun for all of us is planting flower boxes. This keeps kids not only occupied through a day but keeps their interest for weeks. Your children will water their flower boxes everyday and eagerly look for signs of the first sprout.

It really doesn't take a lot of money to plant flower boxes. You will want to skip the overpriced nursery flowers and just buy a few packets of flower seeds from your local store. Seeds are fairly cheap and you get a lot in each package, one pack of each variety should be enough, depending on the size of your flower boxes. The biggest expense you might have will be buying the potting soil. If you have a source for fresh dirt then you can use that also. Just be aware that potting soil has special nutrients in it to help your plants get started.

You can be creative with the containers for your flower boxes. Plastic cups are cheap and plentiful but are not very sturdy. Old Tupperware works well and looks like a professional arrangement when you place it inside of a decorative basket. Milk and juice cartons work because of their waxy coating that helps contain the water. We even used an old teapot as a flower box and it turned out to be one of our favorite flower boxes.

Whatever container you use will have to have some kind of drainage. With milk cartons and plastic containers it is easy to poke a few small holes in the bottom. Teapots and containers made from harder materials that you cannot pierce without drilling will benefit from a different type of drainage. Place material such as rocks the size of jawbreakers in the bottom of the flower box. Make sure you have about 2 inches of drainage material. I have used cut up egg cartons and broken pottery as well. We will be placing the soil on top of this material so make sure the gaps between the drainage items are not large enough to let the soil sift through.

Follow the directions on the back of your seeds for planting and watering advice. I don't usually heed the spacing instructions, if you end up with too many plants you can always pull some later. I like my flower boxes to be spilling over with blooms so I plant more seeds then recommended.

Make sure to cover your seeds well, because children are notorious over waterers and it would be easy to have seeds float away. I have a couple of watering cans that create a gentler spray than a hose and the kids love to water their plants every evening. You can get these at a local dollar store. The kids can also use those old milk jugs for watering the flower boxes if you don't have a watering can.

Once you have this easy flower box project completed you might be ready for a more ambitions project. Walk around your neighborhood for ideas of containers for flower boxes and gardens. Down my block we have seen old bathtubs, overturned buckets, old tires and even toilets used as unique planters. While I prefer to keep my plumbing inside there are countless other options for a decorative yard.