Tips for Gardening with Children

Gardening is a healthy, environmentally friendly and economically responsible way to provide food for your family. However, trying to manage a garden when there are little ones to care for can become difficult and burdensome. Here are a few ways I have found to accomplish work in the garden while also engaging and educating my preschoolers.

Get them involved

Rather than being a chore that must be done, gardening should be a rewarding, hands-on experience for your children and for yourself. Children can help spread organic fertilizers such as compost, manure, bone meal and blood meal using their play buckets and garden gloves. They love to help dig the holes for potatoes, or build dirt piles for planting cucumbers and zucchini. After you break up soil with a shovel, let your kids look for worms. Teach your child the root from the stem of your onion sets and let them place them in the trench. And of course, all children love to water with their own watering can, even if it's just one from their sandbox. While letting your children help in the garden may be a bit more time consuming than if you did the work yourself, use the opportunity to teach your child about how things grow.

Make a space for them

I like to make the garden a special place for my kids in two ways. First, I like to reserve a space in the garden where they can plant leftover seeds. I do not organize or oversee their endeavors; rather I let them copy the things that I have taught them in the main part of the garden. This not only gives them time to experiment with growing their own plants, but also buys me some time to do some serious work on my own.

Secondly, I reserve a small corner of the garden for a "sand box." Even though we have a sandbox, my children do not like to play there when I am in the garden, so in this way they can dig in the dirt but still be with me where I can see them. You can use string or straw to mark a border for them, or you could even fence the area.

Let them enjoy the fruits

After all of the work of fertilizing, planting, watering and weeding, it's important to let your children enjoy the fruits of their labor. We keep strawberries, snap peas and cherry tomatoes in the garden just for our kids to savor. They are able to go into the garden, pluck a treat off of the vine or stem and enjoy the rewards of their hard work. This teaches wonderful life principles such as sowing and reaping and eating healthfully.

Though gardening with little ones takes creativity and planning, it provides a great educational experience for them as well as gives you the chance to have quality time together.