Teaching Kids to Garden: 4 Essential Tips

Gardening is a learning, fun, and healthy activity for kids of all ages. Growing food helps them learn about math, science, and nature. Besides learning gardening skills, they also learn life skills such as responsibility, patience, and teamwork. They also gain understanding and become confident in what they do. In addition, gardening tasks exercise different parts of the body, making kids physically fit. Moreover, as kids grow their own food, they are happy to try out these foods, which encourages them to eat healthily.

However, gardening at first glance isn’t often appealing to kids. Most need some pushing and encouragement to get interested. Teaching them gardening is also not something easy. If you are to succeed, you need strategies that work. Here are four tips that work wonders.

1. Assign a garden space for them

Assigning a small portion of the garden that your child is solely responsible for is a good way to get him or her interested and involved in gardening. Kids love it when you make them feel like responsible individuals. When you leave the planting, weeding, watering, and all other activities for them in his or her own garden space, he or she will be willing to take up the challenge. Just be sure to choose interesting and easy to grow plants for them. In addition, always be there to offer them guidance when carrying out tasks.

2. Make things interesting

When there is fun and excitement attached to it, kids are likely to get interested in learning about gardening. Find ways to add in some fun and excitement to lure them into joining the activity. You can start by buying gardening tools in fun and exciting colors and patterns. Ensure that they are the right size so that they have an easy time using them. You can also take advantage of the fact that kids love creating things. Find items that you can reuse to make different things for the garden. You can make anything from a scarecrow to keep birds away from the crops or paint empty containers that you can turn into planters. Having a birdbath and feeders to attract different birds and animals to the garden is also another way to add some fun to the garden. In addition, include brightly colored flowers as well as plants with a lovely smell and different textural qualities.

3. Don’t make things too hard

While gardening tasks can be fun for the kids, some difficult tasks are highly likely to make kids keep away. Do the hard tasks such as digging and let the kids handle the smaller and easy tasks. Kids would love transferring seedlings from the seedbed to the garden or picking flowers, fruits, and vegetables. In addition, let them use their beautiful watering cans to water the plants. In addition to assigning easy tasks, choose plants that grow easily without much trouble. Kids don’t always have as much patience as you to wait for months for them to harvest. For this reason, let them grow crops such as lettuces, sweet peas, squash, and radishes among others. The joy of enjoying their harvest every now and then can easily get them hooked to gardening and curious to learn more.

4. Let gardening continue throughout the year

Consistency is very important when teaching kids anything and it is not different with gardening either. If you down the tools during off seasons, you are likely to start teaching them again from scratch when the season time comes. The good thing is that technology has made it possible to garden indoors successfully. When it is not favorable to grow crops outside, create an indoor garden so that your kids can continue gardening and learning the skills. You can start an herb and vegetable garden or plant indoor plants to beautify your home. Invest in LED grow lights to help you provide your plants with the right amount of light so that they can bloom and thrive.

 Conclusion

Teaching kids how to garden can seem daunting. Though it calls for a lot of patience, it can be easy with the right strategies. Find interesting things to include in the gardening to get kids interested and give them tasks that are easy to handle. You can also allocate a small garden space of their own that they can be responsible for. In addition, take gardening indoors so that they can continue learning throughout the year.