It’s National Children’s Gardening Week from 25th May to 2nd June, which coincides with half term. This is a great time to swap out screen time for green time. There are so many benefits of gardening with children as Squires Garden Centres highlights in this article.

Here are a few simple gardening ideas to try this National Children’s Gardening Week…

Quirky Planters

You can transform unwanted items such as old wellies, shoes, tins and bottles into quirky plant pots. They look great and are a brilliant way to recycle unwanted items. Suttons gives the rundown on what flowers to sow this month: https://www.suttons.co.uk/flower-seeds/flowers-to-sow/may

Sew some fruit, vegetable and salad seeds

This is one of our Summer Holiday Challenges. Get some seeds that are suitable for sowing in the summer months and are easy to grow such as carrots, salad leaves, cucumbers, peas or pumpkins (which if sown May/June will be ready for Halloween). Let the kids prepare the ground, sow them, label them and care for them. Then look forward to harvest time! I find children are usually more open to eating/trying things they’ve grown themselves.

We’ve also planted some potatoes in the past.

Cress heads

An oldie, but a goodie. Remove the top of the eggs, leaving two-thirds intact. Wash the shells and carefully dry. Then decorate with felt tip pens. The usual is to draw a face to accompany the cress ‘hair’, but great creative! Next dampen some cotton wool balls in water and place one in each shell and then sprinkle some cress seeds on top. Put them in a sunny spot and in about 5-7 days it’ll be ready to harvest. Egg and cress sandwich anyone?

Encouraging wildlife into your garden

Plants provide food and shelter for wildlife. In previous years, we’ve scattered wild flower seeds and have done Beebombs, which attract butterflies, bees and other insects.

Flowering plants such as lavender, foxgloves and roses provide plenty of nectar. Birds love the humble daisy, and sunflowers are a big hit as we discovered for ourselves.

You could also add a Ladybird tower to attract this cheerful spotty bug to your garden as well as the other beneficial insects, which keep pesky aphids and greenfly at bay.

Grow sunflowers from seed

Who doesn’t love this cheery, bold and bright flower? They’re incredibly easy to grow and shoot up quickly. Now is the perfect time to sow seeds outdoors for blooms from June through to September. You can even plant a seed in an individual biodegradable pot containing a soil coin and start off indoors. The pot can then be planted directly into the ground outside when the sunflower is ready. The Big Sunflower Project has some handy hints and tips on the transition from indoor to outdoor.

Make a miniature terrarium – mini garden in a jar

We’ve not done this before, but it looks cute and fun!

• Use a clean glass jar such as a jam jar
• Add a layer of decorative stones and sand
• Top with soil
• Add moss on top that will act as grass
• Plant miniature plants or cuttings into your jar
• Get creative; add a small decorated rock or Lego characters, plastic figurines or animals

Similarly you can create a fairy or dinosaur garden. Simply sow flower seeds that are appropriate for the time of year and add decorative details such as a house, pebbles and mini ‘trees,’ and then add your figurines.

Happy gardening and please post any of your children’s’ gardening ideas or projects in the comments section below.

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Getting your children to eat more vegetables can be a challenge. We know how much healthier we could all be if we ate more greens and less sugars. Unfortunately, children don’t tend to be that bothered about what’s good  for them. Foods that are green in colour can’t possibly be nice; can they? I’ve found that my children are better at eating more vegetables if they grow the plants themselves. So this is what we did…

Small Indoor Vegetable Garden

As we wanted to start the garden immediately, we installed small covered plant shelving units in our house. These stand about five or six feet tall with various wire shelves for holding pots and containers. You can get started at any time, even in the middle of winter, as long as you provide ample light and keep the plants warm. As long as you have the basics for a plant covered, it can flourish in nearly any locale. You need:

• good quality lighting
• sustainable temperatures of  20-26C  (70-80F) – depending on what you’re growing
• water monitoring

Good Lighting
Plants are photosynthetic meaning that they will convert light into the energy they need to survive. In theory, any light source will sustain a plant. Sunlight is the most common as it’s the most intense. The more intense the light source, the better it is for the plant.

Sustainable Temperatures
With an indoor garden you don’t want the plants to get too cold or too hot. Don’t put them near the windows as the cool temperatures could be harmful in the winter.

Monitoring the Water
You need to be careful with watering an indoor garden. Since the sunlight isn’t available to evaporate moisture it can collect onto the soil. If the temperature is warm and there is no airflow, it could begin to form mold.

Seeds are Cheap

I allowed each of my children to pick a few packets of seeds and selected vegetables that were easy to reproduce such as bell peppers. Everything was very cheap. I was quite impressed with the vegetable selection of my children and pondered why they were so excited to eat fresh veggies when they wouldn’t even touch the ones we’d bought from the shops. Depending on the plant, you want to make sure you have enough room for growth. Watermelons and pumpkins usually require greater space due to the sheer size of the fruits, and because the plants vine outwards.

Individual Projects

Once we started planting the seeds, I helped each child to use the Internet to research how to care for their plant. I’ve never seen my children so intent on learning and so keen to nurture something. It was like watching a mother tend to her own babies. Perhaps that is part of why children are more likely to eat food they’ve grown themselves. We printed each individual plant’s specifications and the children followed the suggestions to the letter.

Pointing Out the Irony

As the children grew ever excited to see vegetables begin to form on the plant, I didn’t point out the irony. This is an edible product that the children grew themselves and are proud of. If this is what it takes to get them to eat more greens, then I will happily buy seeds regularly. There are three main reasons why I keep quiet about the fact that they are eating greens:

1. It’s fresh vegetables that they actually want to eat
2. It’s an activity that keeps them occupied
3. It saves us money

Harvest our Vegetables  

For children that hated the thought of eating vegetables, there is quite a bit of excitement when it comes to harvesting various edibles. As these foods are as organic as you can possibly get, I have no worries about what my children are consuming. There are no pesticides to wash off or growing chemicals used that could put my children in future danger. It brings a smile to your face when you see the children are so excited to harvest foods they grew themselves.

What We’ve Learned as a Family

Throughout our food growing experience, we’ve learned that ranch dressing can be used as a dip for just about any vegetable. I’ve learned that my children are far more likely to eat foods that they’ve grown with their own hands. Perhaps this has something to do with learning hands-on or the swelling of pride they get when the plant successfully produces food. In either case, my children found a great deal of enjoyment and nutrition by growing their own plants.

I have no doubt that my own participation plays a role in our gardening practices. It seems the more excited I get, the more excited the children become. Now we have the indoor gardening shelves, which I use for fresh herbs in cooking; and the children and I maintain larger plants outside. The kids are learning the value of fresh and nutritional foods being grown from home without spending money at the supermarket. Whether or not this knowledge follows them throughout their life remains to be seen. I am just glad they are eating vegetables now.

Ken Myers is a father of three and passionate about great childcare. Find out more about expert childcare by checking out @go_nannies on Twitter.

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