Your Kids Can Help You Learn to Garden from Scratch

We all know how young children love to play in the dirt and sand. Just add a little water and in an instant they are making mud pies and sand castles. They do not seem to need any of the sharp, or even fancy gardening shovels, hoes, or rakes, before diving right in for earthly play time. They only need to be pointed in the right direction to help you create a functional family garden.

Gardening Tools for Kids

Other than using their hands, which they will, for digging and playing mud-pies in the dirt, your children can be quite resourceful when it comes to finding their own gardening (playing) implements. Before they start rummaging through grandma's silverware chest, why not put those rusty slatted, over-sized barbecue spoons to better use, digging and tilling the soil out in your garden?

If you have ever retrieved hidden silverware after a bout with the garbage disposal, these items will also make excellent stainless-steel, childhood gardening implements. Damaged forks work well for your older kids to work on easy weed-pulling, by the roots. Even small spoons are capable of digging holes big enough to plant dwarf fruit tree roots, or small enough for seeds.

Kids are Natural Seed Hunters

Your kids can be great seed hunters as you've probably already noticed when watermelon or other types of undiscovered seeds have been accidently served to them. Providing your kids are over five years old, give them the apple cores and other fruits to de-seed, while you are slicing up their favorite snack fruits.

Give your kids the project of saving, drying, and labeling those seeds in envelopes, dating by month and year. Seeds are best replanted within a year, and can be traded with their friends, for other favorite fruits and vegetable seeds (although fruit seeds will be in higher demand among kids).

Natural Garden Mulch & Composting

Reusing disposable coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, and organic matter, your kids can help you to stock pile homemade compost (outside). Saving the parts normally trimmed off your fruits and veggies, such as citrus, and banana peelings, melon rinds, tomato vines, leaves, and tops, can all be chopped up in a food processor, and used for nutrient-rich garden compost in a hurry.

For naturally potent bug-repellents mix in garlic and onion-skin trimmings, roots and tops, along with your soil compost. Compost mulching and natural bug repellents will insure abundant garden-growth, as explained in the book "How to Grow an EMERGENCY Garden" (Badgett & Majors, 2010).

Nutrient-Rich Organic Fertilizers

Organically natural fertilizer can be mixed into garden soil for immediate nutrients. Abundant gardens can be found using emulsified fish guts and/or crushed fish heads. Using either store-bought or fresh-caught whole fish, the filleting process (before cooking) of removing the head, gutting and de-boning, will allow your kids an educational examination of fish eyes, teeth, gills, stomach, etc.

As awful as this may sound, it is actually a great way for kids to learn about aquatic creatures. When I was young my dad brought home large albacore tunas from deep sea fishing trips. As he filleted it, he would put the dissected guts, head, eyeballs, and other fish parts in bowls, for my scientific investigations, while I learned how to fillet and cook fish.

Just make sure to emulsify, crush, or grind up bones, or other sharp garden hazards before using as family garden fertilizer. Elevate or hang gardening planters when using this type of fertilizer, to prevent very young children or neighborhood pets from tracking the scent, and digging it up.

Digging up a buried fish head, would also pull out the foods you are trying to grow in your garden. However with your kids' willingness, your family's gardening endeavors will ensure they know how to grow their own food, just as readily as we buy it in the stores.