School will soon break for the summer, and kids will be home with time on their hands. A garden of their very own can keep them occupied. A personal “Kid’s Garden” gets young people outside in the fresh air, keeps them active, and is a great way to combine exercise and learning as they plan, plant and care for their personal plot. The young guys can grow what they like or experiment with some new vegetable and at harvest time plan meals from produce picked from their own garden.
Kids model parents. Parents that enjoy gardening, spending time in the outdoors pass along the pleasure. So, the first order in a kid’s garden is to make it fun.
Start small and make a design. Maybe put together ideas for a theme garden, like the pizza garden in the Texas Spur April 7 gardening column. Have them sketch their ideas on paper using colored pencils or crayons.
Give them some catalogs and let them choose a few flowers and vegetables or take them to a seed rack and let them pick out their own packets.
Sprinkle seeds of bright-colored, quick-growing, flowering annuals like marigolds into a design of their making. Burpee Seed has a great idea of sowing seeds in the shape of the child’s name. Marigolds are a good choice because there are some compact growers that will not grow too tall and produce flowers all summer. Children can learn that it is important to cut off the spent flowers so that more flowers are produced. They can save the seeds from the spent flowers to resow for planting in another section of the garden.
Kids love bugs. Big bugs, small bugs, good bugs, harmful bugs. Bugs and beetles. Insects that fly, insects that crawl. They can begin collecting insects, learning the names of the insects and if they are true bugs or classified as beetles. This is a terrific way to get children interested in the amazing world that is only seen at ground level. There are books on identifying insects from fairly scientific books like “National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders: North America” to “Insects for Dummies” to “Hello, World! Backyard Bugs” by Jill McDonald.
More ideas for Kids’ Gardens will come next week.
Some information from burpee.com
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