Planting a Garden With Children
I feel very fortunate that I'm able to share my enthusiasm for gardening with the children and this year I finally get to do something I've been wanting to do for a long time - actually create a garden for the young school kids I work with.
As luck has it, the new Pre-K/Kindergarten teacher lives right across from the school, has great light in her yard, lots of water and is willing to take care of the plants over the summer holidays! Perfect! The one draw back is it will have to be a container garden (I do prefer planting directly in the soil) but that has many upsides too!
Advantages of Container Gardening:
- can be more manageable, easier for kids to care for and gives better control over growing conditions
- some, if small enough, can be started indoors and moved outside when the weather is more suitable
- is more flexible and portable. We can position our plants in locations best suited to them and move them as the season changes to catch the best light or for more shelter plus you can bringing them indoors to grow them on in the winter time.
- can be better adapted for accessibility, have them at heights you want and can use areas without arable soil or places such as balcony, deck or concrete pads.
- can be less chance of having pest damage
Right now it is in the planning stage, figuring out such things as:
- How much growing space we have. We have a long counter top space for getting things started indoors with lights to fit over them, and there is a large open space on the south side of the house for outdoor gardening.
- What to plant. We want things that are fast and easy to grow for some early success in our gardening and can fit into the school season plus things the children will eat.
Ideas I have for things to start with is
Our Fastest Growing Vegetables
- different seeds for making sprouts, like sunflower seeds, peas, alfalfa, radish and broccoli seeds
- lettuce, with some of the different colorful varieties
- radishes, the Easter egg variety which has many different colors
Plants That Take Longer But We Can Start Earlier
- peas and bush bean plants. A cool way to get an early start on them is to grow them in eaves troughs indoors, properly spaced, then just slide them out of the trough and into the larger containers outside.
- potatoes in grow bags. I have one that allows us to reach into a flap on the side to harvest potatoes with out harvesting the whole plant.
- cucumbers, that are suitable for containers like cool breeze. I want to start in peat or paper pots that we can transplant the plant and pot into the bigger containers without disturbing their roots.
- cherry tomatoes. A project that we already have going on each year with the Pre-K kids is growing Tiny Tim tomatoes, started early so each child will have a fruiting tomato plant, in a 1 gallon pot, to take home at the end of the school year. We can plant out a few of those in the school garden too.
- Little Tom Thumb carrots can be grown in containers too. Kids seem to love carrots.
We don't want to make it too big and get overwhelmed but I do love gardening with children! I love their sense of wonderment of seeing the miracle of a seed growing into a full, food giving plant! I also like them to start picking up that skill of growing your own food, a skill which once they have, they will never have to know hunger!
"Let's Garden - Beginner Gardeners Tips" flip through it here
If you would like to do some gardening with children - here is a beginners gardening guide I created -
You can flip through it here
This is my entry to Natural Medicine's collaborative challenge with Inner Blocks with a chance to win up top π·π»πΆ πππππ plus π·πΆπΆπΆ π±ππΈπ»π³ & π»πΎπππ ππΎπΊπ΄π½π - Details Here
Image from my friend's phone camera
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