Gardening With Children Grows Fun

Children are more apt to develop a fondness for plants if they associate gardening with "fun" rather than "work." Insisting that your kids weed the vegetable patch each Saturday without sharing the joy of picking a bouquet of lilacs or planting a few seeds is likely to put them off horticulture for life. It's all in the way you approach gardening with them.

You can also turn an hour in the garden into a mini-botany or entomology lesson. A lot of science happens in a garden: the miracle of germination, soil chemistry and the bug-eat-bug world of beneficial insects destroying their prey.

 Here is a short checklist of things that will make gardening more "kid friendly":

• Keep projects and instructions simple.
• Acquire kid-size gardening tools so they'll be able to work comfortably.
• Let children make some of their own decisions about what to plant, and where — let them make a few mistakes, too.
• Take children on trips to the garden center to pick out seeds and flowers.
• If you have the space, give a child a small patch of his own to design and fill with whatever he chooses.
• Garden for short periods of time — changing activities frequently keeps kids engaged.
• Plant vegetables your child likes to eat. Concentrate on varieties that grow quickly, like green beans and radishes, but be sure to include a cherry tomato for later in the season.
• Let kids grow something just for the fun of it: lambs' ears, a bean teepee, chocolate-mint scented geranium, a dwarf butterfly bush, or yellow beets instead of red.
• Plant a "salad" or "pizza" garden in a giant pot — include a bush tomato, oregano, basil, leaf lettuce and a cucumber vine.
• Make your own salsa from homegrown tomatoes.
• Plant "baby" anything: beets, carrots, spinach, filet beans, potatoes. Vegetables taste better when you've harvested and prepared them yourself.
• Grow anything "giant:" sunflowers, pumpkins, dahlias, squash.
• Plant a little cactus garden in an old worn-out sneaker. Use succulents without thorns such as hens-n-chicks and trailing sedums.
• Germinate grapefruit seeds indoors or start an avocado pit or a sweet potato top in a pot of soilless mix.
• Force a hyacinth bulb into bloom in a small vase of water or measure how fast a giant amaryllis stalk grows.
• Start tomato and pepper seeds on the windowsill for transplanting to the garden in spring.

For lots more project ideas and gardening activities, visit the National Gardening Association's website: www.kidsgardening.org.