Gardening with kids is always an adventure and almost always a great way for kids and adults both to learn about gardening and nature. Is there anything better than a child discovering the seed she planted is now sprouting? Or perhaps the look of utter joy when they taste that first delicious strawberry of the season?
Gardening with kids can also test our patience at times. Though they mean well, it’s not unheard of to find that when they pulled all those weeds, the sunflowers came up, too. Of course, that’s really a lesson for us to slow down and remember that gardening with kids is supposed to be fun.
One thing it’s important for adults to understand is that gardening with kids, which seems like the most fun you can have in the backyard, isn’t all that fascinating to the average child with the attention span of a peanut. Or maybe like Anita B. Stone learned in The Little Girl With the Hose, it’s more fascinating than we realize.
Gerald Burke explores a similar question in Kids and Gardening. Will your kids remember gardening with you fondly or is that just another activity gone with the wind of technology?
Beware, though! Not all stories of gardening with kids are just about sharing the love of gardening. Sometimes, the kids team up to trick us. Deborah Young’s story, Outsmarting Mother, is a perfect example of what happens when our kids put their brains together and teach parents a thing or two. But mom is smarter than they think.
When you’re gardening with kids, you might be planting more memories than vegetables. And that’s okay.
Feel free to stay a while and enjoy all the stories we have about gardening with kids, below. And be sure to check out our Gardening with Kids Collection while you’re here, which features a hand-picked selection of our favorite stories from this category.
Imagine buying a home and finding out that someone planted you a surprise garden! I find many sweet stories of mini gardeners when I page through our library of GreenPrints issues, but as the mom of a little sunflower-lover, this one touches my heart a little extra. In this story, “Secret Sunflowers” by Mary Anglin-Coulter, […]
I remember watching a film strip (yes, I’m old) in grade school that showed me how people wasted up to four gallons of water if they left the faucet on while brushing their teeth. That same filmstrip highlighted the environmental benefits of the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Since then, my environmental sustainability efforts happen in small steps, especially in the garden.
I always love the story of a gardening underdog. Gardening offers a unique opportunity to connect with the natural world and express yourself creatively. I enjoy growing flowers, herbs, fruits, and vegetables in my own garden. It’s one thing to simply admire nature; it’s quite another to take an active role in creating something beautiful […]
Last Valentine’s Day, my daughter’s kindergarten class had a wonderful idea to create seed packets filled with sunflower seeds. As a parent, I was thrilled to help out, and together with the other parents, we spent an afternoon decorating the packets and carefully filling them with the promise of future tall sunflowers. What I […]
Oh! The joys of family gardening. I realize that might sound a little sarcastic, but I’m being serious. I love gardening with my family. It’s gives us a chance to spend time together outdoors, with the sun overhead, warm soil at our feet, and the reward of delicious fruits, herbs, and vegetables nearly all year […]
Whether it’s a grandmother’s or mother’s garden, the gardens we remember from childhood are almost always places we can return to in our minds to find a moment of peace or calm. If we’re lucky, we can even go there in person. In story after story as I’ve read through the GreenPrints archives, I see […]
Gardening with children is always an adventure. Don’t get me wrong. I love spending time in the garden with my daughter. And as we’ve gardened together, she’s learned more and more. Like many young gardeners, she even has her own set of gardening tools and some specific jobs. As you might imagine, I try to […]
Garden snakes. Garter snakes. Yard snakes. The name may change some, but the moniker usually refers to a small, harmless species of snakes that find homes in gardens or other similar areas. They’re great for helping keep mice and other small rodents away from your vegetables, so I’m generally inclined to let them stay if […]
If you grew up reading books like The Lord of the Rings or The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, you might understandably believe that if you want to find a magical secret garden, you need to head off to some forgotten realm or stumble upon an adventure. Can you imagine how magical a Hobbit garden […]
Until my daughter began helping me in the garden, I never realized how much I would learn by gardening with children. I knew I would take her out to the garden, and I assumed she would watch me patiently and lovingly, helping pull weeds here and there or learning to tell the difference between daisies […]
