As parents, we want to engage our children in healthy, character-building, strengthening, and fun activities that don’t involve TV screens, video games, tablets, or smartphones. Gardening is definitely one of the activities that will interest and educate your children. When they look up from their respective screens, the thought of growing something in their garden can be engaging.

Encouraging and Educating your Kids in the Art of Horticulture

The best thing about gardening is that you can involve your kids in this activity throughout the year. From planning to decorating, planting or harvesting, children can enjoy each aspect of gardening. As your kid experiences the sprouting of little roots, leaves, branches and finally, the fruit, this entire process will enrich them with a great deal of patience, awe, and wonder at the art of nature. However, involving them and maintaining their interests is the important part, and in this article, we will discuss how you can woo your kids with gardening.

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Get them their own supplies

Naturally, having a cute watering can, a small spade, scissors, seed packs, tiny trowels, childrens gardening gloves, and other gardening equipment will give them a sense of responsibility towards the garden. They will see themselves as an important part of the entire activity rather than just tagging along as you work yourself. It’s best to get them a little notebook as well to create their own gardening journal, and this will also help you analyze their level of interest.

Gardening Activities

It’s important to make gardening as much fun as it can be. You can play games, such as a gardening scavenger hunt, or perhaps you can divide your garden space among your children, and ask them to create their own adorable little gardens, which will be rewarded upon their aesthetic, beauty, and gardening skills.

Girl planting garlic cloves in a garden bed

Photo: my teen planting garlic in the fall – both my kids learned all about growing your own garlic.

Learning about Horticulture

As you and your kids spend a day of fun working together in the garden, use this opportunity to educate them about the basics of gardening, such as the kinds of flowers, types of soils, earthworms, the mechanisms of soil, the process of photosynthesis, the benefits of herbs, and a great deal more. This is probably your best chance to inculcate in them a desire to nurture the beauty of nature and to utilize it to enhance their health. You can add to your gardening with things like a worm bin, rain gauge, compost bin, insect hotel, and so on.

Gardening with children is undoubtedly the best way to increase your kid’s interest in science by teaching them through experience and outside the restricted boundaries of a classroom. From the science of soil, to the anatomy of plants, vegetables, fruits and much more, your children will surely love this learning process and absorb it all like a sponge.

Gardening is Healthy!

Research reveals that the soil is rich with parasites, and bacteria that tend to strengthen the immune system, particularly for the kids that are in a growing age. Furthermore, gardening is an extremely healthy activity that lightens up the mood, kills away anxiety and stress, and releases happy endorphins.

So, grab that shovel and get outside. Happy gardening!