How to Grow a Robust First Garden With Your Children

Posted on by

There are so many things kids can enjoy about gardening: digging, picking, identifying color, texture and flavor. If you have a small area of ​​your yard to dedicate to this activity, why not create a garden for your children? You can make it very simple using cut and come again vegetables and flowers, as well as high-yield and low-maintenance vegetables. You can find all of these seeds and plants at your local nursery.

Plants you will need

Here’s what I recommend for your kindergarten:

  • The beginning of cherry tomatoes

  • Sunflower seeds or starters

  • Lettuce seeds

  • Radish seeds

  • Beet seeds

  • 1 package of six green beans

  • 1 six pack of carrots

  • 1 pumpkin filling

  • 1 cucumber to start

Cherry tomatoes are almost guaranteed success and a bountiful and consistent harvest. If you choose a full-size tomato, there’s too much of a chance you’ll pick the tomato prematurely before it’s ready, or the mood will be ruined when blossom end rot or worms infect that tomato. If you choose a mid-height sunflower, you can cut it and let it grow side shoots throughout the season, or you can just let it bloom and bring it to the bees. If you water carefully, lettuce, radish and beet seeds should germinate easily. Young children find it very enjoyable to pull out radishes and beets, and you can pull leaves from lettuce and it will grow back.

I suggest starting with carrots instead of seeds because carrots are notoriously difficult to germinate and take a long time to reach the desired size. Cucumbers will complement possible salads from the garden, and pumpkins will be a late-season highlight when the rest of the garden is empty. You can save the pumpkin seeds from this year’s jack-o’-lantern for next year’s garden.

Garden layout

When planning your garden, you want to use seeds to separate the tomatoes on one side from the pumpkins on the other. Here’s my proposed layout. Starting on one side, plant the tomato. Remember that tomatoes need support, so use a tomato cage or other trellis and add it early. They are then difficult to put on. Now plant rows of lettuce, radishes, beets, carrots and beans across the bed. Make sure the beans come last. At the other end, place the pumpkin at the top of the bed and the cucumber below it. Plant a few sunflowers (no more than two or three) in the corners of the bed. Place a wire rack between the beans and cucumber to allow the beans and cucumber to rise.

Credit: Amanda Bloom

Caring for your garden

You will need to water the bed once a day, first thing in the morning. You want to water until you can feel the soil moist when you stick your finger about six inches into the bed. Sunflowers and other seeds should germinate within a few weeks, and a month after planting, it will be time to thin out the radishes, beets and lettuce to one healthy seedling every six inches.

All crops will be ready to harvest at different times, but each of these crops provides the opportunity to pick, grab, and dig with a variety of different textures and colors. You can make several salads from these crops and even eat green beans at multiple meals. Everything in this bed can be eaten without cooking, so you can snack in the garden.

More…

0
Plants

Leave a Reply