Practical Life Skills: Gardening Ideas for Kids

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One of the most important life skills you can ever teach your kids is where food comes from and how to produce it for themselves. These gardening activities for kids will help you pass on this valuable heritage to your own children.

Gardening is a life skill that all kids should learn. Planting and harvesting food is not a one time activity. It’s a process that takes time. 

No lesson plans or fun garden activities will build this muscle in your children. To see young plants through to maturity, you have to be spending time on a regular basis weeding, watering, pruning, and caring for them. Beautiful gardens that produce a bountiful harvest require much time and consistent care. 

Why You Should a Garden With Your Kids

Why should I have a garden when I can buy the same thing in the grocery store for a similar cost for the time I put into it? Have you ever asked this question? 

While it is true that having a garden may not save much money or save only a little money, in my opinion, the advantages outweigh the cost.

Having a garden helps kids see where food comes from and how much work it takes to grow it.  

When I think about how heavily our fruits and vegetables are sprayed with pesticides, I have a lot of peace knowing that a large portion of our produce is grown in our backyard. 

Another great reason to garden with your children is because it teaches them the generational skill of growing their own food. Thankfully, we live in abundant times where we can get whatever we need at the grocery store. But should more difficult times come when they would need to know how to provide for themselves, they will have built the muscle for it.

Benefits of Having a Yearly Garden

Perhaps the best part of having a yearly garden is that it draws kids outside. With so many various colors and different things to see, a garden gives kids something to observe and do. 

Even public schools are beginning to realize how important it is for young kids to have plenty of leisure time in the natural world. As a result, schools all over the U.S. are adopting environmental education programs into their curriculum.

For many years we have had a vegetable garden in our backyard. Because of all the time our kids have spent gardening, they can identify the name of each plant by seed, flower, or leaf because they are so familiar with them.  

Every time we go outside, the kids discover some new wonderful thing that they want to know more about. Spending time outside sparks on-the-fly Nature Study lessons as we try to learn more about each specimen. 

How to Start a Garden

If you’re wondering how to teach your kids gardening skills, don’t overthink it. Just start a garden in your own backyard. 

Don’t spend too much time worrying about having the soil just right or what each plant needs.(In gardening, you learn as you go. After several years of gardening, I’m still learning new strategies.)  

Before you put the first plant in the ground, it’s a good idea to learn the plant hardiness zones in your location. This tells you the approximate last frost date so you can determine the when it is safe to plant 

Pick a good sunny spot for a garden bed, use a hoe to dig up the sod, and put a few plants in  the ground. I recommend buying plants from a nursery for your first time. After you have a few successful years of gardening, then you can try growing from seed. 

Remember to water your garden daily, especially when putting the plants into the soil. Watch for predators like rabbits and moles. You may have to protect your plants while they are still small. 

It would be best if you also protected your plants from weeds that try to choke them. We like to use landscape cloth to put between our rows. It costs a little money initially, but saves a ton of work if you use the same landscape cloth every year!

How to Help Kids Develop a Gardening Habit

It’s not hard to teach kids how to grow something. Put a seed in the ground, water it, and pull weeds around it. The habit of gardening, however, is a bit more difficult to master. Seeing something through from start to finish takes hard work and consistency.

• Aim to spend a little time in the garden every day. Kids can help water, weed, and pick off any bugs that are pests.
• Go out in the morning hours before it gets too hot. 

Young Children

Having a garden bed, however small, may be too much for young children, but they may enjoy having their own mini garden in a large pot on the deck or patio. Fill a clay pot with 3-4 plants. A very small natural space will be much easier for little ones to maintain. 

Gardening Easy Ideas

Try these easy gardening activities for kids to get them excited about growing food for the family!

Seed Starting

After you have a successful harvest for a few years, you may want to try starting seeds indoors. This is a great activity for children of all ages. 

You can buy seed starting trays from any hardware store. Make sure to buy seed-starting soil, not just potting soil. Have the kids put a small amount of soil in each cell. Make small holes in each section, drop in 2-3 tiny seeds, and cover it up. Watering the soil before planting will help the seeds to not bubble up and displace. This is a great way for young children to sharpen their fine motor skills.  

It can be a test of patience making sure they got seeds in each plug while also not doubling up on others. We always plant our seeds on the kitchen counter, or patio table so that it’s not too hard to clean up the mess. 

Rain Barrels

One fun experiment for older kids is to find ways to conserve water by using rain barrels to collect water.  Did you know you can irrigate your own garden with rainwater rather than running up your water bill using the tap?

How To Make A Homemade Rain Catcher: 11 Effortless DIY Ideas Explained

Challenge older children to find other smarter ways to be more efficient in the garden! A little Google or Pinterest searching will quickly spark some new inspiration. They might surprise you with their ideas. 

Garden Markers

One creative way to get kids involved in the garden is to have them make garden markers. When we plant seeds in our garden, I like to mark the rows with some sort of stick or marker. These garden markers below are one simple idea that any child can put together quickly. 

How to Make Garden Markers At Home

Flower Gardening

While growing a vegetable garden is a practical life skill, flower gardening will bring color and beauty to your home. Nasturtiums, marigolds, and zinnias are easy flowers to start with for kids. Our kids like to try making beautiful flower bouquets from the flowers we grow around our property. 

Herb Garden

An herb garden is a fun way to add taste and smell to your outdoor endeavors. In our home, we invested in a dehydrator. We looked through the pantry at some easy herbs to grow that we use often in cooking. For us, sweet basil, oregano, and mint were easy to grow and dehydrate. We use basil in soups; oregano is delicious on our homemade pizzas; and mint makes delicious meadow tea.  

Notebooking

I have a few kids who learn best by writing and drawing what they observe. Provide plenty of colored pencils, pens, and watercolor paints for your children to use in making a wildlife journal or nature notebook.

They can sketch the pests they see in the garden. Another idea is to have them measure and graph how tall certain plants grow from week to week. 

This is really fun to do with cucumbers. Measure the baby cucumbers when you first see them on the vine. Measure the growth each day write down your findlings. Your kids will be amazed to see how quickly they grow overnight!

In this post, I share how we make a Simple Nature Study notebook in our homeschool. 

Gardening as Homeschool Curriculum

Can gardening be used as your main science curriculum? Yes! You can extend your gardening lessons into the winter months by studying these topics. 

• life cycle of plants 
• parts of a plant and flower
• which seeds need to be started indoors
• identify a plant by seed, leaf, flower, and fruit
• identify wildflowers, fungi, mosses, weeds
• movement of sap and absorption of water
• photosynthesis, how plants make food 
• types of pollinators
• plant blights
• common pests
• organic material in soil
• how much water and direct sunlight plants need

While spring, summer, and fall are the best times to study outdoor gardening, these are some of the concepts kids can learn about gardening at any time of year. When I look for books on these topics, I go to the non-fiction kids section of the library. Let your kids pick their favorite books.

Excellent Gardening Books for Kids

Here are a few of our favorite books to inspire kids to garden. 

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Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

This is one of my favorite books of the Little House on the Prairie series for boys. Almanzo tells detailed stories about American home life on the homestead. Readers get a glimpse of the daily work it takes to feed a family from the food you grow. 

The Trellis and the Seed by Jan Karon

This is an inspiring book for anyone that wants to have a flower garden. The illustrations alone are a feast for the eyes. 

The Backyard Homestead

If you have a small property, you will be amazed to see all that you can produce on an ¼ acre plot by reading this book!

I hope these gardening activities for kids help you get started incorporating this practical life skill into your family life. Don’t miss the great opportunity right outside your front door!  

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