April is Kids Garden Month, making it a great time to consider all the health and learning benefits gardening provides for young people: healthy, outdoor activity; teaching important life skills; and helping kids develop a love of nature, to name just a few.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) says when gardening with kids, focus on the process, not perfection. Kids don’t need to worry about straight rows; they need to dig, explore, and discover in the garden.
The benefits of gardening for young people are many. It takes them away from their screens and gets them outside in the fresh air, moving around and engaged with nature. Taking the time to slow down and observe sparks their natural wonder and curiosity about the environment around them. Growing their own fruits, vegetables, and herbs and harvesting them makes kids more likely to eat them. The healthy food choices promoted by home gardens are deepened when kids are taught food prep and cooking skills. Let them create their own recipes or learn to make family favorites on their own.
The garden provides an almost limitless source of sensory exploration. Think of the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes of the garden. Textured leaves and stems, warm soil, ripe raspberries fresh out of the patch, bird song, and pollinators. Gardening offers many hands-on opportunities in science, math, STEM, and STEAM as concepts become real-life experiences. From seed germination to harvest, kids can track growth cycles of plants and make measurements for plant and seed spacing as well as planting depth for transplants, shrubs, and trees.
Responsibility is another great skill learned through gardening. Kids must follow through with garden plans, care for plants, and learn how their dedication and work impact living things. Young children improve fine motor skills by handling seeds or planting young transplants. Older kids learn planning and problem-solving skills as they decide on the best planting times and locations, and then deal with challenges such as pests, diseases, and damage from severe weather.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society has great ideas for gardening activities with kids. Give them their own space or container and let them dig, plant, and water. Use dead tree branches to make a fun fort. Stick the branches in the ground in a circle and then pull them together at the top to close – secure with twine if needed. Plant pole or scarlet runner beans around the base that will twine their way over the structure.
Have kids decide on a fun theme garden – the possibilities are endless: color themes, hidden gardens, a pizza garden with plants for making pizza, a Halloween garden with pumpkins, gourds, and squash for fall, a pot roast garden with potatoes, carrots, and onions, or a butterfly garden. They could create their own world in a garden with space to play with farm and construction toys, dolls, and more.
Take kids to the garden for painting and sketching. Have a garden tea party or make lovely flower bouquets for a pretty table setting or to give as gifts.
Whatever you decide, PHS says to celebrate young people’s gardening efforts, not just the results, and rotate activities to keep the interest going.
