Gardening for Children: What Can You Offer Them?

Not many people understand the benefits of gardening for children. Adults tend to underestimate gardening activities (and their perks for kids) when compared to physical activities, such as playing or sports. In reality, gardening has been proven to deliver positive results for everyone, including children. So, what can you expect from this activity?

About Gardening Activity for Kids

Gardening isn’t only fun, but it’s also healthy. Kids can learn about new skills, including about nature, facts, and also science about growing plants or their own food. Gardening for children can include interesting activities, like weeding, mulching, watering, planting, and others. Most kids love being active outdoors. They don’t mind getting dirty either, so make use of this ‘nature’. They would be excited to dig the soil and watch their plants grow.

The Benefits

Everyone can enjoy gardening. But kids will have the best perks. Not only will they have fun, but they can also learn new stuff. Not many people realize that gardening for children includes educational perks, such as:

Understanding. Kids can learn about causes and effects, such as weeds can compete with the plants so you need to remove them or plants will die without enough water.
Responsibility. These kids must care for their plants, so the plants can grow bigger and healthier.
Discovery and reasoning. Children can learn about weather, animals, environment, plants, nutrition, and also simple construction in a simple scientific manner.
Nutrition. Kids can learn where plants get fresh food and the effect of good nutrition (or bad) nutrition.
Self confidence. They feel good about themselves (and somewhat gain a sense of confidence) when children have reached their goals and watch their plants grow, or even enjoy the food that they produce
Physical activity. Don’t you know that gardening can be pretty tough and challenging, physically? After all, kids learn to do something fun and yet productive.
Creativity. They can learn about finding exciting and new ways to grow the plants.

Keeping the Kids Safe

If you want to introduce fun (and safe) gardening for the kids, you need to make sure of these things:

Make sure that you choose the right tool with the proper size too. Gardening tools for toddlers would have a different size from those for pre-teens.
Keep the fertilizers and sprays in a safe place, out of reach. It’s better if you can have a high rack where the kids won’t be able to reach or access it.
Secure the gates and fences.
Never leave water buckets (filled with water) unattended, especially around toddlers and very young kids.
Stay away from chemicals if possible. It’s always a good idea to have an organic garden.
Make sure you have safe storage or a container for tools and equipment.
Provide shade with a shade cloth or umbrellas, especially during hot and sunny summer time.
Children should wear appropriate clothing, including sunscreen and a hat. They should wear boots, long pants, and suitable (but comfy) clothes.

The Appropriate Plant Types and Selections

Naturally, kids are attracted to bright colored and big flowers. They also love veggie plants that can grow fast. Some of the examples include corn, pumpkins, and sunflowers. It’s a good idea to grow plants that have unique textural and sensory qualities.

For the touch, you can consider snapdragons, bottlebrush, or succulents like aloe vera.
For plants with bright colors, you can consider marigolds, sunflowers, pansies, rainbow chard, or daffodils.
For the taste, you can grow cherry tomatoes, rosemary, strawberries, carrots, peas, or basil.
For the sound, you can choose bamboo, grasses, or corn. They produce a rustling sound when brushing against one another during the wind blow.
For the smell, you should consider having lemon balm, native mint bush, pelargoniums, lavender, sweet peas, and jasmine.

Final Words

In the overall end, gardening does have its own benefits for kids. Gardening for children can be advantageous and fruitful, and it doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult.

Photo by Filip Urban on Unsplash