*This is a collaborative post.
As the season that symbolises growth and renewal, spring is a better time than ever to get started with a new hobby – especially if that hobby is gardening!
Having a beautiful-looking garden is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and one of the best things about it is that the kids will love it too. Getting them involved in planting, growing, and maintaining nature is an incredibly rewarding experience, and it teaches your children a ton of key skills to boot.
Naturally, though, where mud and mess are involved, things can get stressful quickly. Here are some tips on how you can embrace the hobby of gardening this spring, get your kids to help out, and end up with a stunning outdoor space that will evolve alongside you.
Safety First
Your most important first step is making sure your garden is safe for you and your kids. Winter brings with it a tough time for plant life, and that means ice, sharp branches, and general decay.
Make sure you systematically go through and remove any obvious dangers before you bring the kids out, and take the opportunity to remove all the dead plants, give the soil a good til, and add some fresh compost if needed.
This is also a good time to make sure any tools and equipment are in order, like ensuring rakes and spades aren’t especially sharp or broken down and that the pots you already have aren’t severely damaged (ceramic can be incredibly sharp if broken).
Choosing the Plants
Once you’ve reached a stage where you’re comfortable that the garden is nicely prepared, it’s time to pick your plants. When considering what spring flowering bulbs and seeds you’re going to buy, get the children to help you choose: they’ll enjoy picking the colours and helping you decide how to properly arrange everything so that it looks as pretty as possible.
Just be sure to choose plants that grow well in spring and take care to make a note of when they’re going to flower: different plants will come up at different times, so for maximum aesthetic impact, it’s crucial to time your planting in accordance with this fact.
Instilling Good Habits
One of the most common things people forget is the need to keep on top of things once they’ve set a garden up. For example, it’s essential to maintain an established watering schedule, make sure your technique is sound, and take care to find out how much watering each individual plant needs.
Many of your plants will also need a bit more help than water can bring to grow their best: this is where store-bought fertilizers come in to push your flowers to come up strong and healthy. You won’t need to fertilize very often for most, but once again, make sure you understand the elements unique to each plant.
It can be helpful to write up a colour-coded chart that contains all of the above information, including drawings for each plant – the kids will love designing this, and it keeps them invested in what they started.
Wrapping Up
Gardening is an incredibly rewarding hobby, and especially so if you have children. Hopefully, this quick guide has provided you with the help you need to get started; as you gain more experience, you’ll find you learn the most simply from getting stuck in and figuring things out for yourself. Good luck!
Yes, gardening is incredibly rewarding for children and adults alike. I agree that quick results are important for little ones though I remember my first ‘quick results’ vegetables being radishes that tasted rather unpleasant. However, my ‘quick results’ flowers were forget-me- nots which I thought were enchanting.
love the idea of a colour-coded chart to support the verbal instructions given to children for looking after what they have grown.