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As I write this, I am in Arizona on our annual Holiday pilgrimage. We escape here every year, in the dead of winter, to get our dose of Vitamin D, just when we need it the most. Over the past few weeks our family has spent a lot of time together, celebrating the Holiday’s and taking some time off of work and school. Probably like you, at this time of year, I spent a lot of time looking forwards, but also looking backwards. Photo albums, old pictures in my phone, and family stories highlight how fast time moves and how quickly the kids are growing up. Another year goes by in the blink of an eye and, although I know it’s kind of cliché, I just keep hearing myself say, “It goes by so fast. How did they get so big?”

It is for this reason it is so important to take advantage of any opportunity to spend time with the little ones…connecting, enjoying activities together, and sharing what you love. For people like us, getting our kids excited and involved in gardening is the perfect opportunity. It gets everyone outside. It gets everyone active. (It gets the kids off the screens!) It offers kids a better understanding of where their food comes from and what it takes to grow it, regarding of whether it is you growing it, them, or a farmer 500 miles away. It teaches hard work, and responsibility. But most importantly, its an opportunity to be creative together…makes things together…accomplish hard things together. It is a win-win for everyone.

So, for these reasons, I am sharing things I have done over the past couple of years to get my kiddos out in the garden with me. Hopefully some of these resonate with you and your littles, and you can all get digging together.

How to Get Kids into Gardening

1. Get Your Kids Their Own Gardening Tools

When kids have their own gardening tools and accessories that they really like, it gives them an opportunity to take ownership of their interest in gardening. It also ensures gloves and tools are right sized for little hands. Working with loose fitting gloves or a spade that is way too big to easily and safely fit in their hands is uncomfortable and cumbersome to work with. Make sure your kiddos have tools that fit, are safe, and that they can call their own. And don’t forget the gardening hat. Little faces can burn in the garden sun too. We got my youngest a Paw Patrol hat, gloves, and little watering can last year, and it definitely increased his enthusiasm for joining me in the garden.

Having their own gardening tools is also an opportunity to teach responsibility. Ask them to clean their tools properly and find a special place for them to be stored. Then set expectations around maintaining and cleaning up their garden tools once finished using them.

2. Make it a Source of Creative Inspiration

When my littlest was still too young to really take an interest in gardening, I found other ways to include him in the fun. Creative art projects that use the garden as inspiration are a fantastic way to do this.

A garden painting project.

Break down a large cardboard box, get a bunch of kid friendly acrylic paints, and lots of different size brushes. Take it all out to the garden and have the kids paint pictures of all the pretty things in the garden…plants, flowers, trees, little animals, family, swing set…whatever inspired them.

When my littlest did this recently, we cut the drawings from the larger piece of cardboard and hung them on the wall closest to the garden, where there was a small overhang protecting them from the elements. Voila, we had colorful garden art! And the cardboard and paints stood up longer to the elements than paper and markers would have.

Other projects could be painting river rocks, getting white gardening gloves and tie dying them, or bringing out building blocks or Legos and building little secret cities hidden amongst the plants and flowers.

3. Find Plants that are Easy to Grow

Kids want to feel like successful gardeners. We all know the let-down of feeling like you just can’t grow peppers, or you are terrible at raising tomatoes. It’s a widely known philosophy that the key to motivation is feeling like you can be successful. Kids are no different. So, give them plants to grow that will ensure success and quicker gratification.

Kids love growing wildflowers.

Buy inexpensive seed packets and larger boxes of all kinds of wildflowers from Amazon or the Dollar Store. Using old seed starter trays, help the kiddos plant lots and lots of wildflower plants.

The seed starter trays are key because…

1. They keep the kids from getting wildflower seeds all over your garden. (Once those little suckers are loose in the wind and spreading over the garden, it can be hard to eradicate them.)

2. They take longer to plant them than just dumping them on the ground or in a pot, and helps the little ones work on their dexterity.

3. The trays help the kids track their own plant’s growth, which is nice when you have multiple kiddos.

4. The number of little plants provide lots of little victories as they grow and bloom.

For older kids, use this activity to teach how to transplant seedlings, without the risk of losing your own summer starts. For the younger kids you can leave the plants in the trays, help them find a nice place in the garden where you want a little color, and over time the flowers will grow over the tray, hiding it and giving your garden a nice pop of color.

4. A Children’s Garden to Call Their Own

This goes back to ownership. Just like an indoor playroom, kids need their outdoor garden playroom. Let them stake their claim to their own little piece of dirt. Make it their garden. Make it special. If possible, section it off with little metal or plastic garden dividers you can find online. Then give them control of their little garden. They can plant what they want, how they want, with guidance, not directions, from parents. In the kid’s little garden plot, any successes will be all the sweeter because it is their successes.

5. Plant Ready to Eat (and cool looking) Food

I think this is my kid’s favorite thing about our garden. And, well, it’s probably mine too. I love to see them outside playing with friends, and they walk over to the garden to snack on snap peas or strawberries, and then head back to their friends. Green beans and baby tomatoes are another snacking favorite. It’s an easy way to get a little more fruits and veggies into a kid’s diet, and they are raw…what could be healthier?

Kids love midnight snack tomatoes

This past year I planted a cherry tomato plant called midnight snack. It is deep red with a dark purple star. It might just be the name…after all who doesn’t love a midnight snack…but my kids were fascinated by these tomatoes and ate them completely off the bush before I could get to them. Kids like weird and cool looking stuff, so apply that approach to your plant selection.

6. Create a Whimsical Garden

Magical and enchanting are also good words for this. It’s important not to take your garden too seriously. I have learned to love garden gnomes and faeries as a way to add a little magic to our garden, and frankly our lives. Let the kids build little cities and pathways. Create little garden art projects. Last year a good friend who works as an exhibit fabricator made us twenty-four little white plaster garden gnomes. The kids spent the summer painting the gnomes and hiding them all around the garden. Eventually the gnomes began to migrate all over the neighborhood, and it became a community-wide hide and seek to find and collect the gnomes.

Build a home for fairies, gnomes, or unicorns

Find some broken terra cotta pots or break them on your own. Line them with fake, or real moss and using found objects, small toys, bits of artificial foliage, and some creative ingenuity, turn them into a unicorn wonderland.

7. Kids Can Help Harvest

Gardening has its challenges, but who doesn’t love harvest time? This is the easy part and a great job for kids. When my kids ask me what is for dinner, I have been known to toss them a cardboard box and tell them to go see what they can dig up outside. While this works, I would suggest a more subtle approach. Either purchase, help them make their own, or have them decorate a gardening basket. Or just have them use one from their toy collection. And teach them how to properly pick the fruits and veggies. The last thing you want is for them to tear your plant apart, or even out of the ground, just trying to get a green bean free from the stem. Scissors or garden shears need supervision and instruction when used by little hands, but tender plants can often be cut with children’s scissors and there are lots of gardening shears on the market with shorter and duller points.

8. Making Sweet Things with Your Harvest

Nothing motivates kids like the promise of a sweet treat. So, if you want them to pick fruits and veggies, a great motivator is what you will make with it. Maybe its zucchini bread, or strawberry scones, or maybe roasted carrots with honey. Another of my favorites is putting pureed potatoes in my pancakes, or shredded carrots in my cookies. There are lots of ways to sneak those veggies into kid’s foods, so make them some sweet treats that you can feel good about as a post gardening snack.

Here is an article from Eating Well that offers some recipe inspiration.