How to Start a Garden with Your Kids

We were blessed this year and now we have the space to plant our own garden. Since I don’t know the first thing about gardening, I had to do some research first. I went to the library and got out these beginning gardener’s books, this one was my favourite: Northeast Fruit and Vegetable Gardening. It has lots of pictures and got straight to the point. I’m a beginner and I’m not looking to do anything fancy. My goal was to do all the research in order to help my children start a garden. Turns out my oldest (M1) read my books as well and learned quite a bit. Luckily we already had a garden plot ready for us to use from the previous owners. We bought a mix of peat and compost and worked it into our soil. We wanted to do things that I knew we were going to eat so the first thing I thought of was tomatoes and cucumbers. Green beans are suppose to be easy so I wanted to make sure we were definitely going to end up with something to eat. Hubby and I also love fresh herbs so we decided to grow cilantro, thai basil and my mom brought me some herbs from her garden as well. We were definitely limited by the types of things we could grow since I didn’t start them indoors in the spring and there just isn’t much variety at our local stores in terms of fruit. M1 did pick out some cantaloupe seeds. We are on a budget so we have to sow our own seeds instead of buying plants to transplant into our garden. ***Look at that gardening terminology I’m using, sounds like I actually know what I’m talking about, lol. I had the kids help me sow the seeds, after reading the instructions, the kids helped in measuring and spacing the seeds and rows apart. We planted 3 seeds together and then went according to the seed spacing measurements on the package. We measured the first couple and then eyeballed the rest. The kids love watering the garden, however, it has been so rainy here the past couple of weeks that we haven’t had to do much. The plants are looking good and the seeds have started to sprout. I had M1 help me mix the fertilizer and apply it as well. We have a garden calendar to keep track of when we need to apply fertilizer which is about once a month until we get some fruits, which will then need to switch to every 2 weeks. If you don’t have a garden in your backyard, try doing it in some containers. We planted the herbs in containers, which is super easy, and easy to care for as well. You just have to make sure you keep them well watered. If you get your children involved in the planning stages, they’ll be just as excited as you to garden. We eventually will need to start thinning our plants, but I’m looking forward to some yummy goodness that we’ve grown ourselves. Make sure you check out the other blog posts in this 3 Days of Summer Series.

Make sure to check out the other bloggers in the 5 Days of Summer Series over at Sidetracked Sarah