Having your grandkids help you with the gardening is an excellent way to teach them about a huge number of aspects of the world around us, as well as being a whole lot of fun. Small children can be amazed when a seed they planted suddenly produces a green shoot. Older kids can take pride in producing flowers for the home or vegetables for the table.
One of the things that children like about gardening is that it's 'for real'. They're used to spending a lot of time engaged in fantasy play or playing with toys, but when they're gardening, they're interacting with the real natural world. Whether they grow small plants in a pot on their bedroom window sill, or help you planting flowers and vegetables outside, they're witnessing life and death happening before their eyes.
Most people, understandably, want to focus on the happy aspects of children's gardening, but it's also a great way to introduce them to the concept of death in nature. Not all of their plants will thrive. From those that do, some will be weeded out. Others may be hit by pests or disease. All of this needs explaining to kids. They may be disappointed at first but understanding how nature works will help them later, if they're faced with the death of loved pets or even family members.
The best way to start kids gardening is to take one plant at a time. Favourites for little children are plants that sprout easily, grow quickly and have brightly colored flowers or attractive leaves. Good examples are primrose, pansy, geranium and lamb's ears.
Sunflowers are great for a sunny garden, because they grow so big. You can measure their progress each week - just like measuring your grandchildren's growth, but faster. Little kids will also recognize sunflowers easily, because they look just like the typical picture of a flower that they see in cartoons and books.
Chidren also love to grow plants that they can eat. Strawberries are perfect because they can go hunt for them in the garden. Salad vegetables are good too. Anything that needs to be cooked is not so interesting for most kids, unless you want to involve them in the cooking process too.
Organic kids' gardening is the best kind, of course. You wouldn't want your grandchildren to be exposed to a lot of chemical pesticides or even fertilizers when they're working with you in the garden. Small children, especially, will touch the earth as well as the plants, and some of what they touch usually gets into their mouths.
This also means that you'll probably want to avoid poisonous plants - particularly if you have very small grandchildren. This requires a little research because some plants are toxic where you would not expect it. For example, the plants of the nightshade family, which includes potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers and eggplant, often have poison in the leaves even though other parts are edible.
If you don't have a garden, you still have plenty of options. You can grow flowers or herbs in containers in the house or you and your grandkids can become involved in gardening projects in the community, or when visiting friends and family members. However, when choosing the latter option, it's important to keep in mind that kids need to visit the garden often if they're going to understand and care about what's happening.
For some ideas about gardening jobs that even tiny children can help out with, check out what Sam's up to in the following video...
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