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Ilona's Garden Journal




child garden

Create A Child’s Garden, Grow Love For Nature

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Let Your Children Discover the Benefits of Gardening

by Jaine on Flickr
by Jaine on Flickr

Do some of your goals for your children include eating more vegetables, better grades, and improved immune system? Does that seem too good to believe if I told you gardening is a pathway to all three? Well, believe it! Gardening is good for children, and they can have fun enjoying the beauty and curiosities of nature while those goals of yours are part of the menu.
Children Who Garden

Growing their own vegetables encourages children to be excited about eating them.

Playing in the dirt, (AKA gardening and growing plants), is known to improve immune response due to contact with certain helpful bacterium.(1 )

Gardening involves science, and is a great hands on way to learn more about science related subjects. (2)

 

peter rabbit
Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter books are full of stories that involve the garden, from Mr. McGregor’s busy work in the vegetable rows to Mr. Benjamin Bunny’s stroll..

What Type of Garden Is Best For Children?

Which would you like for your children?

The type of garden that matches the child’s interests is the best for them. This will vary with their age and other factors…including your own interests and what you would like to introduce to them. A garden of good things to eat is always popular, so salad gardens or herb gardens can be a place to start. Fun themes, like a pizza garden that includes all the makings of a great pizza (tomatoes, peppers, basil, oregano) is one that is easy to grow and supplies the kitchen.

Do your children want to have fun with crafts? Pressed flowers from their own garden patch may be inspiration for the garden they wish to grow. Bird house gourds to carve and paint, or decorative Indian corn provide plenty of craft materials. Even grow your own dried flower supplies, and then create Christmas gifts for that year.

 

If you have the room, giant pumpkins might be a choice to provide a porch pumpkin in the fall- the biggest in the neighborhood! Match up your space, your child’s interests, and your own- the project might be so much fun that it will inspire a lifetime of love for gardening.

A Fairy Garden Project – The perfect plan for interesting your child

Next- just grow stuff

That’s right, some potting soil, big size seeds like nasturtiums and zinnias, or beans, an empty eggshell pot or old egg carton and you have started! Just seeing those green sprouts pop through the soil is enough to get the ball rolling.

Now you are ready to go out in the garden and plant, weed, and harvest. It’s the joy of fresh air with all the interesting things of nature right at your fingertips.

 

Enchanted Fairy Garden Kit

Learning about science, gardening, and being creative is all part of the Fairy Garden experience. why not order a kit or gather together materials to make a miniature garden together?

This could be one garden that is truly your child’s own. It can be a wild garden or one that is indoors, there are so many possibilities!

Be sure to watch the delightful video with children constructing an easy and charming garden from a kit.

You could easily assemble all of these things for a gift your child or grandchild will remember with joy.

Simple gardens for young children, but the age group for which this kind of project is ideal is anywhere from 6 to 12 yrs. old. Or should I say “to adult”? Since we never really outgrow the fascination with making such gardens!
Enchanted Fairy Garden Kit

Catch your child’s interest and imagination with a wonderful Fairy garden-this makes a nice starter kit.

Help Children Keep Tools Organized – With Their Own Garden Tool Set And A Tote

Go Green & Giggle Greenhouse Kit with Tote, Book and Song Cd
Go Green & Giggle Greenhouse Kit with Tote, Book and Song CD

I have my own garden tote very similar to this one, and it is great for keeping all those different hand tools together while working and ready for storage.

 

A Butterfly Net – Catching butterflies on a summer afternoon

If you have a bug house, you will want an insect net to safely catch flying insects. While catching butterflies is something that shouldn’t be done to excess, there are plenty of other insects, like grasshoppers, lightning bugs, moths, etc. that could use a nice little net like this for capture.

Of course, catching cabbage butterflies, which are in no danger and prove a nuisance to many plants, might be the perfect ones to stalk with this net.

Melissa & Doug Bella Butterfly Net
Melissa & Doug Bella Butterfly Net

Everyone is fascinated by butterflies and this net is a safe way to catch some for a closer look. Have a roomy bug house for them and release them when the day is over.

Tips for Gardening with Children – Don’t make chores too much of a chore

  1. There are tasks, but try to keep garden time fun. Keep a balance, and don’t let the child’s garden become more of a punishment than a pleasure.
  2. Choose easy plants, nothing teaches better than success. That is what hooked most of us on gardening. Remember biting into your first homegrown, juicy tomato? Even a child can grow a pot of patio, bite size tomatoes. Easiest Plants For A Child’s Garden
  3. For young gardeners keep the space small… the work should not be overwhelming. You might consider container or raised bed gardens for this reason.
  4. Let them have fun with garden ornaments or odd types of plants… or make a toad house or fairy house as part of the project. A toad house is as simple as a broken flower pot turned on its side, a fairy house can be just a makings of bark decorated with moss or something very intricate with little plates and tiny ladders leading to upper floors.The only important thing is the fun.
  5. Smaller children should always have supervision and tools sized and meant for them.Consider this your one on one time together. It is surprising how fresh and new the world looks when discovering it with a young child.
  6. Encourage them to pick their flowers and make flower arrangements. Children delight in picking flowers and being generous in giving bouquets, the flowers all grow back at some point, anyway….whether this year or next.
  7. Keep a nature journal or garden journal for the growing season.Garden Journal Guide gives you the steps to making your own garden journals, and there are lots of lapbook ideas for very little children.

Seeds and Plants to Make a Child Happy

Easy flowers and veggies to grow

The first thing on the list of creating a garden experience for your children is to make it easy to succeed. Certain seeds are easy to plant, sprout quickly, and grow into a satisfactory plant.

What is the best garden for a child?
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Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots: Gardening Together with Children
Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots: Gardening Together with Children

 

 

Gardening Projects for Kids: Fantastic ideas for making things, growing plants and flowers, and attracting wildlife to the garden, with 60 practical projects and 500 photographs
Gardening Projects for Kids: Fantastic ideas for making things, growing plants and flowers, and attracting wildlife to the garden, with 60 practical projects and 500 photographs

Garden Clothes
Every gardener needs clothes that don’t mind a little dirt and scruff- and that goes double for kids. Overalls, old Tshirts, Wellies or garden shoes, all are good clothing items to wear in the garden

Easiest Vegetable Seeds

Leaf lettuces

Radishes

Swiss Chard

Beets

Green onions

Beans

Plants in the Vegetable Garden:

Tomatoes

Peppers

Broccoli

 

 

Easiest Flower Seeds

Candytuft

Cosmos

Marigolds

Nasturtium

Zinnia

What are some of the easiest seeds for a children’s garden? The easiest plants to grow from cuttings? Find out!

Bright Pink Petunias
Garden variety petunias are a showstopper

Bright Pink Petunias

Easy Plants for the Flower Garden

Petunias

Ageratums

Impatiens

Pansies

Books for Children in The Garden:

Start With A Garden Book

I know, everyone is always trying to sell you something, but really, one of the best ways to introduce your children to the garden is by way of a book. Look for the kind of book written and illustrated just for them, so they can start gaining some enthusiasm for this venture of growing things.

Try one of these book choices.

A Child's Garden: 60 Ideas to Make Any Garden Come Alive for Children (Archetype Press Books)
A Child’s Garden: 60 Ideas to Make Any Garden Come Alive for Children (Archetype Press Books)

Life skills are also a part of the garden experience.

One important characteristic is learning to organize, and what teaches a person this lesson better than keeping important tools together so they are handy when you need them?

Learning to keep tools together so they are easy to put away after the last task is finished is an invaluable quality to cultivate! (Ask me how I know)

A Wheelbarrow: Child size, with a grown-up design

Your child will be happy to help gather leaves and other debris into this child sized, but authentic working tool. This wheel barrow is made of steel.

Toysmith Big Kids Garden Tool Set
Toysmith Big Kids Garden Tool Set

Like mom and dad’s,but in sizes that smaller gardeners can best handle.

CHILDREN IN THE GARDEN THROUGH THE SEASONS

Whether the winter reading and planning, or springtime discovery and planting, summer harvests, or fall leaves, the garden is a whole year of activities, discoveries, and can be fun.

It isn’t all fun and games, of course, but there is always something to do.

There is nothing more natural than sharing your own love of tilling the earth, or at least exploring the wonders of nature in your own backyard.

When gardening we can’t help but interact with mother nature, sunshine,  and fresh air.

 

 

Bug House

A place for the creepy crawlies -much better than pockets 🙂

My children loved these bug houses, and now my grandchildren enjoy observing bugs and insects with the same sturdy screen houses.

Public Gardens Created with Children In Mind

Places for your gardening children to visit

Child's spring day in the garden
Picking pansies, who can resist?

A resource list of places to visit in the USA:

Gardens of Ohio

Buy It Used, and Recycle

Garden with the help of eBay.

Gardening might seem like an old fashioned activity for modern children, a throwback to a more agricultural society, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Is there anything is more pertinent to today’s world than environmental awareness? Gardening is a first hand experience of nature, and it can teach the importance of recycling, as well as something about the challenges of growing food.

Gardening also builds an inner satisfaction that comes from working with nature.

 

Kids Gardening Info and Ideas – more about gardening with children online

cauliflower sheep
Make veggies fun, cauliflower sheep and one broccoli lamb

How to Plant Tulips – Choose healthy bulbs, plant them easily

Dutch bulbs delight children for the same reason they delight everyone: from the almost forgotten fall plantings arise the most fragrant and fantastically colored flowers after the ground seemed barren from winter’s pall.

The fact that everything is included within that compact flower factory we call a “bulb”, and the result is guaranteed for that season makes this the perfect thing to plant to excite a new gardener (or those who have yet to grow their own green thumb).

Spring Bulbs 101 for Beginning Gardeners…

A Child’s Garden – Did you have your own garden?

artists painting
Young Girl In a garden
Did you have a garden as a child?
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Earliest Inkling: Garden Plants of My Childhood

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I have gardened in some way or another for most of my 56+ years now, but I also came from gardening stock -at least as far back as my grandparents. I suppose that is why plants and trees often stand out in my memory from quite early.

The streets I lived on were city streets, but tree-lined and shady, with parks close by. By far the majority of those city streets held sentries of maple trees in the berm between sidewalk and street, in what many now call the “hellstrip”. In those days they were simply a place to plant the trees in ordered measurements along the thoroughfare, giving canopy to passersby in days when walking was much more common a means of getting from one place to another.

Maples were easy to grow and colorful in fall, occasionally they might be relieved by the odd sycamore or sweet gum, but the maple tree in all her variations was queen of the avenues in my old neighborhoods.

It was the fifties and the homes were uniform in their foundation plantings: taxus, juniper, and privet hedges to separate the small lots. Sometimes old fashioned remnants of bridal spirea, and often clumps of forsythia were given their place. My earliest neighborhood also had its fair share of concord grape vines. Trained upon back porch trellis, or in one case a cover over the entire back yard. I loved the sweet grape smell of ripening concord clusters, and would help my elderly neighbor seed her grapes for summer jam. She paid in penny candy:)

When I had my first home, it was not far from that old neighborhood, and that was the place which held a remnant of a white garden. It held onto its ‘Dr. W. Van Fleet’ rose, its ‘Annabelle’ hydrangea, and ‘Festiva Maxima’ peonies from which I branched out into my version of an English garden. All foundation plantings had been removed by the time I arrived, and many of the street trees had been removed….

The forsythia was probably one of the most commonly planted flowering bushes of that time. Its cheerful yellow blooms were rarely blasted by frosts in the protection of closely built houses, and a welcome sign of spring. I have written before of Joanne’s old backyard forsythia, huge in proportion, and of my own homes side planting. It was trained up a trellis on the north side of the porch to cascade over and create a little hideaway; the place where one of my late hamsters had made escape back to nature when once giving him “summer air” on the porch.

I was the garden helper who hedged the privet hedges into little 2.5 foot rows down either side of the front yard: requisite middle class neatness struggling in the shadow of the old maples to maintain some form of respectable show.

I also was keeper of the taxus media bush, with its red little urn berries and tight quarters between porch steps and the sidewalk path to the back yard. I clipped it to within an inch of its life twice a year. Nondescript junipers were placed in front of the porch, shaded by one of those old fashioned green awnings that made the front porches of yesteryear such pleasant places to idle time away in the summer. Those junipers, too, struggled in far too shady conditions for their health. My mother liked to line the front house pathway with crocus…lighting the way from porch steps to public sidewalk each spring. The rest of the small yard consisted of mediocre grass lawns, mowed with the human powered reel mower.

The shady portion between the side path and the next door neighbors was filled with Japanese spirea,S. x bumalda, whose heirs I grow now, in ‘Little Princess’ and ‘Goldflame’ varieties. But then it was the common type, with dull fucshia flowers that I found fascinating for some reason, all sparkly spikey, like tiny ballerina tutus. The back yard began with a burst of honeysuckle vine on the dividing chain link fence. I loved sucking nectar out of those each summertime.

There were some various garden perennials along that fence until the very back of the yard where my mother grew her prize raspberries. We were the ones who prized them. Hollyhocks helped block the view of the alley and turning back along the straight cement sidewalk was a narrow band of wild looking blackeyed Susans and Chinese lantern plants, Physalis alkekengi. In front of that garage was a very old, twisted staghorn sumac tree– my favorite climbing and sitting in and reading tree! It had those crimson spikes of seed fruits, drupes, every late summer through winter with a fall color of golden fern-type leaves. The newer branches were very velvety I recall. Perhaps that is where the common name comes from.

The little vegetable garden was back there, with Swiss chard, okra, tomatoes, peppers, parsley, and chives. Sometimes eggplant. Sometimes it struggled from the black walnut whose roots reached under the garage and thrust its fingers of death to that plot located furthest away without being in the garden proper (vegetables were unseemingly common for the public parts of a garden, then.) The entire north side of the bordering fence was taken by a perennial bed of blooming flowers ending in a clove bush by the house. There were the daisies and this is where the tulips and daffodils of spring were planted, there were some phlox, some monarda, and usually zinnias each year. Big, bright zinnias with stripes and garish color. The hybrid tea roses grew here, but never with the vigor that my mother coaxed out of them in her garden in Northern Ohio when she moved there.

The center of that back yard was lawn, sectioned across its middle by the clothesline that also served as a badminton divide and occasional dog leash line.

That was my garden world in the early years. With one additional old type of tree that is not often found nowadays: the white mulberry. There were two white mulberries in my memory, one I loved and one I passed on the way to school each day.

White mulberries grow quite tall with riven dark gray bark, in a good year they are laden with white mulberries that taste sweet and are much more refined than the dark messy, and staining ones that grow in most places. The one I loved was next door to my maternal grandparents house, in a now rased Hungarian neighborhood. On an old truck farm lot which retained the back field in sweet corn while the city grew up around it, this tree was immensely tall in my child sized memory. Long, long ropes held a swing on which I spent many summer hours, and I have never found any other mulberries to taste with the sweetness that my tongue seemed to recall from that tree. It was the most welcome place, with shade and green coolness, next to the gravel church/funeral home parking lot that was my grandfather’s parsonage front yard.

The other tree Joanne might remember, it was in the garden next door to her old Arcadia house. That was sort of a secret garden to my mind in that time. And I remember the person living there had a very old fashioned phone! But that digresses the story to old neighbors, and the way they provided neighbor children board games and hot chocolate, cookies and candy. That white mulberry tree in the back yard was noticeable to me because of the one I had grown so familiar with- and its pale soft fruits of summer.

The last plant, or tree, is that of the Osage Orange, hedge apples. Each fall my mother would take us to the neighborhood park to gather those huge inedible green fruits; we put them into a basket to give seasonal display in the dining room. Now, I understand they are supposedly good for repelling spiders. Even now, when I can make the time, I like to go and gather some of the chartreuse hedge apples for their good fragrance in the fall. Filling a trug I keep them in my own dining room during the autumn months.

What are the plants of your childhood?