Gardening is a truly enriching activity, offering a hands-on opportunity to connect with nature and enjoy the great outdoors—but it’s even better when you get your kids involved! Transforming your garden into a fun, educational family project is a wonderful way to teach children valuable lessons about patience, responsibility, and where food actually comes from. Ready to ditch the screens and turn your little ones into enthusiastic ‘Garden Helpers’? Dive into our tips and ideas for making gardening an exciting and memorable adventure for the entire family.
*Collaborative Post
Doing is learning
Have you ever noticed that you don’t truly learn something until you actually do it? You may listen to a thousand lectures and read everything there is to know about any subject, but unless you have hands-on experience, you haven’t truly learned it.
My 4-year-old read all about planting seeds in a much-loved book where a certain Grandpa Pig plants a lot of vegetables, and was convinced he was an expert. But when I invited him over to the garden, he was a bit dismayed that the actual soil is… dirty.
I will never truly understand the mind of a child, but for some reason, jumping and rolling around in mud is perfectly alright, but getting your hands dirty while planting some zucchinis was completely out of the question. But let’s be optimistic – these are all the surprises and roadblocks on the way to learning greatness.
If you are scratching your head and wondering how to make a fun gardening project that will grab your child’s interest for a while and make them excited about gardening, we have made a short and easy list of projects to inspire you. Happy gardening!
Homes for our insect friends
Did you know that inviting beneficial insects into your greenhouse will produce much better yields? After all, not all bugs are interested in chomping down on your vegetables. Some of them want to help you pollinate and eat nasty pests.
Helpful critters like ladybugs, bumblebees and ladybeetles help keep your greenhouse healthy – and if you happen to own a wooden greenhouse, hosting a family of spiders or assassin bugs may even help you keep termites at bay. (Who knew that some bugs might be interested in eating the very greenhouse itself, not what’s inside?)
Here is a great chance for a creative project, even if it’s cold and rainy out! And with Autumn and Winter coming fast, you may want to take this project indoors anyway and wait for spring. Insects like burrowing in all sorts of tight places – all you need are reeds, sticks, pine cones, whatever is locally available.
There are so many different ways of assembling insect houses – you can put all the materials in a box, and put the box on a pole – like a birdhouse! You can put the insect box inside your greenhouse – a house in a house. You can even paint them!
Building an insect home can become a small project that will take an hour or a long endeavour that will take most of a rainy afternoon.
We’re painting the Roses Red
In the early spring, fall and winter, most gardens are pretty bare and colourless. It’s when we clean up or are just waiting for things to grow. Even with evergreen plants poking their heads up, flowers are in short supply.
This is why these drab months are perfect for a little painting project – if you don’t have colour in your garden, paint some! Here are some of the things that can go through a complete metamorphosis:
- Concrete and wooden fences
- Flower pots
- Compost bins
- Greenhouse windows
- Garden tool handles (the paint will help to preserve them too!)
- Rocks and borders
- This is for the brave – I once saw incredible climbing ivy that had accent leaves – sky blue, bright red, and even turquoise. It turned out to be a toddler’s side project. This is great when done in moderation, and a lot of supervision.
- Wooden planting sticks – having trouble remembering where you sowed what? Now your child can help you make it easy! Just get some paint stir sticks at your local hardware store and use simple acrylic paints that won’t wash off!
- Rain barrels
- Stepping stones
Get Excited About Growing
We have exhausted all of our artistic options for the garden, and now we move on to… planting things. One of the most common mistakes when working with gardening and kids is making them plant something they’re not excited about.
What plants are the most exciting for the 1 to 10 age group? They have to be a) big b) grow fast c) be tasty d) be pretty e) be unusual f) be useful.
This is the same type of wall that a lot of math teachers hit at one point or another. How do I use this? When will I ever need this? Thankfully, in the plant world, the answer can be more immediate and obvious.
Here are a few amazing plants and some pointers on how your child can use them:
Loofah – here is a very exciting project for those of us who love natural beauty products. Did you know those expensive, organic loofahs aren’t actually sea creatures but vegetables? It’s a huge surprise for a lot of people!
Loofahs are actually large gourds, and you can grow them, harvest them, and use them at bath time! They are very fun to grow because they’re creepers. If you build a lattice or a makeshift mesh tent, they will not only grow around it but become a great hiding place for kids.
They need a long time to mature, so it’s a good idea to start them early, indoors.
Pumpkin – here is another impressive and fun plant. You can plant seeds in small containers when it’s still cold out, and put them out on the windowsill.
The best part about planting pumpkins is waiting for them to mature – it coincides with fun events like Thanksgiving and Halloween. One vine can produce several pumpkins, so some can go in pumpkin pie, some can be carved up into decorations, and the others can be made into pumpkin bread, pumpkin soup, pumpkin noodles – if you want a kid who’s excited about cooking, pumpkins are a great gateway vegetable.
A tip from the pros – one of the best places to plant pumpkins is a compost pile – if you don’t have self-planting pumpkins there already!
Sunflowers and Sunchokes – these two are related and share some amazing kid-friendly qualities. For starters, they’re very fun to grow. They grow fast, and they’re not super demanding.
Second, they are both delicious. If you wait till fall, you can show your kid how easy it is to pick sunflower seeds straight off the big sunflower head or puree sunchoke tubers into something much healthier than mashed potatoes.
What’s great is the potential ROI of fun, especially if you pick a sunflower species that grows from a little seed into a tree-like monster plant. This is a dream come true, especially for toddlers.
A tip for growing sunchokes – if you don’t want them to take over your garden, consider growing them in large containers. They’ll be easier to dig up, too!
A Fun Hobby for all Seasons
Gardening fun doesn’t have to stop in winter. You can prepare for spring by painting flowerpots, planting starter seeds or building fun projects. And remember – the dirtier you get, the more fun you’re going to have – whether it’s paint, dirt or both at the same time!