Gardens and children are a good mixture
If you garden and there are children in your life, find a way to welcome them into the garden. You can give them a plot of their very own or just include some “kid-friendly” features or “fun” plants in the family garden. Here are a few ideas:
– Plant a pizza garden by outlining the pizza with marigolds for the crust, defining the slices with basil, oregano, and parsley, and then filling the slices with tomatoes, onions, and peppers-all the ingredients to make a pizza.
– A salad bowl garden can be a circular area with several varieties of lettuce and other leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, onions, carrots, and parsley.
– A rainbow garden can be made of flowers or vegetables in all the colors of the rainbow planted in curving arches or each color planted in a separate “garden.” For the vegetables, use radishes and tomatoes for red, orange peppers and carrots, yellow peppers and tomatoes and squash, purple eggplant, blue corn, and so on.
– Plant onions in circles and call them “onion rings.”
– Make a bean teepee with pole beans growing up stakes tied at the top and large enough for a child to sit or hide in while eating fresh beans. A sunflower house with morning glories growing up and over strings laced across the top as a roof makes another great place for kids in the garden.
– Create a maze by planting sweet corn or popcorn in double rows just far enough apart to walk through. Make the path twist and turn, and create some blind leads if space permits. Sunflowers work for this, too.
Popular plants for children to grow are: Sunflowers, Peas, Peanuts, Popcorn, Radishes, Spaghetti squash, watermelon, and pumpkins. Flowers like marigolds and zinnias are good for children’s gardens because they are large, bright, and colorful, as well as fast and easy to grow. Snapdragons are fun, too, because the flowers snap open when pinched and look like talking dragons.
Having kids in the garden is fun, but there are challenges, too. It means that you have to accept a little chaos and probably a few damaged plants. Tomatoes may be picked too soon and potatoes harvested too small. Seeds may be planted in handfuls and plants pulled as weeds when they are not.
Don’t expect the children to do much work in the garden either, at least not at first. They do love to water, but detailed, tedious, repetitive chores like weeding and sowing large areas with small seeds can be boring and a real turn-off. Instead, let them learn to love the garden as a place to explore and have fun before you make them responsible for its upkeep.
Most of all relax and enjoy sharing your enthusiasm and love of nature with them. Your children will soon see the garden as a fantastic world where they can explore, observe, smell, taste, learn, and grow.
From: “Solution Source” a Web-based information system from Penn State Cooperative Extension.
For information on other gardening topics visit the Web site at a href=”http://solutions.psu.edu http://solutions.psu.edu end
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Cathy Brady and Don Fretts are educators with the Penn State Cooperative Extension,
an educational network that gives people access to the resources and expertise of Penn State University.
Penn State Cooperative Extension is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state and county governments.
Local extension educators and volunteers can be reached at fayettext@psu.edu or by phone at 724-438-0111.