Learning to Garden with Children

Teaching Them a Love of Growing

Many people love to garden and they happily pass that love on to their children. By encouraging help and teaching them about the different things you need to know to garden well. But what if your just getting started yourself? Here is a basic how to guide to making gardening an easy and fun past time, For you and your children.

First you need to prepare the land or soil. Some people have room to make a garden in the yard. Others opt to container garden. Whatever you decide you have room for there is ground work to be done. You will need a decent soil, i like to buy mine at a local dairy, they premix in old manure for well fertilized soil, and its only a fraction on if the cost of what soil is at a greenhouse or any others store for that matter. Soil can get very expensive so look around and ask around at greenhouses about where is a good inexpensive place to get decent soil. You also at this step need to decide where your garden is going to go. For me it was right out my back door, for my parents it was on the side of their house. You want an area that gets good sunlight, but some shade wont hurt it a bit. In fact shade can be a very helpful tool for gardening as too much sun can burn some more delicate plants.

Once you have your area planned out for your garden, you need to mark it off. We did this by building a wooden box around my mothers garden, and putting large rocks around mine. With my mothers garden, we put in the frame and filled it with soil afterwords. With my garden, we put the soil down and then outlined the outside with large rocks, later it was fenced in. Either way, we had a garden with defined boundaries. This is a great step for children to be involved in. Putting the soil into the garden, smoothing it out, creating the outside boundaries of the garden. True many children prefer to play in the soil but they are there and its part of teaching them. Create rows in your garden, you want them to be about 8 inches wide, with a space in between at least wide enough for you to walk through. Build up your rows there the plants are able to drain properly into the walk paths. We try to build our rows up at least 6-8 inches higher then the areas left to walk in.