Plant a Garden with Your Kids

Even though it's easier to just transfer a plant right into your garden from a local greenhouse, doing it "the hard way" is much more fun and educational. When you start your plants inside, it's exciting to watch them grow every day and see how big they are getting.

In our garden we usually do tomatoes, transferred from a started plants that we bought. We also plant green peppers, and sometimes jalapenos. But last year in addition to what we normally plant, we started a watermelon inside several weeks ahead of time.

It was so much fun watching it grow every day, and taking care of it. We learned that an old clay pot works just fine, but the pot needs to sit on a plate of some kind or else water gets everywhere. We put in dirt from the garden and planted our watermelon seed in the pot. In about a week or two, it sprouted. This was the exciting part when we first saw it!

The kids took turns watering it every day, and watching it grow. When it was warm enough and the threat of frost was over (about mid-May here in central Iowa), we took it outside and planted it. That year we also learned how fast and far a watermelon vine will grow - it took over half the garden! Mom really underestimated that one!

This year we decided not to buy any starter plants at all, but rather start it all ourselves. After seeing how much fun the kids had with pumpkins last fall, we decided that's what we would let take over the garden this year. After having tomatoes planted for the last several years, we are slightly tired of them. Plus of course, some always manage to come up all by themselves, so we'll just let them.

Since these seeds came straight from pumpkins we had bought last year, I thought it might be a better idea to plant more than one. I wasn't sure how well these were going to grow if they'd grow at all. We got several pots ready since we weren't just planting two different types of pumpkins, but decided to plant a few other things as well. These pots I picked up for super cheap at an auction several years ago. (If you have the chance to pick up a bunch of old pots, don't hesitate!) The pots are all sitting in old baking pans I wasn't using. Watch that these don't rust - might want to put foil under just in case. I'm wishing we would have done that from the start.

In all we planted 5 pumpkins, 5 pie pumpkins, 3 zucchini, catnip, and tomatoes (by request of my oldest, he wanted to see if they'd grow!). My daughter also wanted to plant an apple seed after she was finished with an apple one day. I really don't know how to take care of apple trees, but I let her anyway. Ironically enough, there's now a tomato plant in that pot because the dirt came from our garden. Ha ha!

So far in addition to the tomato growing in the apple tree pot, we've had two of our regular pumpkins come up. It's amazing how much it's grown in such a short amount of time, and so much fun to watch it get bigger every day. The kids love to take turn watering the plants and keeping an eye on everything.

Early spring is the perfect time to start your garden indoors, so get started now if you haven't already!