How to Create a Garden Your Kids Will Love

Gardening can be a rewarding experience. Gardening with your kids can be fun and rewarding. It can also help bring out your little scientist and teach your child about the benefits of sustainability and eating healthy.

Not only will planting a garden and having your children help be a fun activity that you can do together - but you'll probably spark an interest in your child in a variety of subjects. Besides learning how to grow and cultivate vegetables, your kids can learn about insects and animals, biology, responsibility, nutrition, and sustainability.

UseVining Crops

Beans and peas are great vegetables to use when gardening with children because not only are they hardy - but their vines can be shaped into almost anything.

You can build a teepee or create tunnel structures with small trellises or stakes that will make excellent places to explore and hide once the vines start climbing. If you're extra adventurous you could even shape the trellises like your kids' favorite animals. A parrot, a dog, an elephant!

Plant Holiday Crops

Plan early and plant some pumpkins. Have your own pumpkin patch ready by the time Halloween comes around. The kids will surely enjoy carving pumpkins that they planted.

Watermelons for the Fourth of July - or just the hot summer months in general. These types of crops are fun to grow and fun to eat once they're harvested.

Insects

Not only will you need to teach your child about insects that are harmful to the garden vegetables, but you can show them ways to prevent them naturally. Tuna cans filled halfway with water placed around the garden are great slug traps.

Plus, you can teach your child about beneficial insects and how to attract them. Plant flowers that butterflies love and you'll get great color, and interesting butterflies.

Create beetle houses for ladybugs and other beetles around the garden with rocks and timber. Great places for bugs to hide out and great places for kids to find them and study them.

Teaching your kids about gardening can create wonderful time for the family to spend together. Plus, your kids will learn the satisfying feeling that you get when you grown your own food and eat it - helping the environment by growing and eating locally.

Being able to prepare a meal at home and in the middle of the preparation ask your 5 year old to go outside and cut some fresh basil or parsley is a feeling that is easy to grow.