Young Farmers: Grow Your Own Vegetable Garden

As the summer months are only a blink away, gone are the indoor activities you do with your children. These are now changing to educational and fun activities that you can take outside to make the most of the truly British summer, as we never know when the sun with next be out again! Not all educational activities have to be about maths and literacy, but being in the outdoors, getting their hands muddy and learning more about the practicalities and hard work that is put into food preparation and sustainability. At Easy2name we believe that gardening with your children can be very rewarding, offering an array of opportunities for your children to play, learn and grow! Before they get green fingers, it might take some convincing to get them into gardening, but once they are interested they will love the sense of responsibility and ability to eat what they have grown themselves. We suggest giving your children their own gardening space, using easy and lightweight tools, encouraging them to get as messy as possible as well as setting up a worm farm or making a scarecrow too, encouraging them to get more involved. Benefits of Gardening With Your Children From fruits and vegetables to flowers and trees, there are many benefits to both you and your children when they put on a pair of wellies and get green fingers!

• Encourages a healthy diet – when your children grow their own carrots, lettuce and strawberries they will gain a sense of pride in eating what they have grown themselves and learn the importance of healthy eating.
• See, hear, taste, touch and smell – let your children embrace all of their senses. From touching the soil and seeds to seeing the vibrant colours and experiencing the scents of the flowers.
• Create little scientists out of your children, introducing them to the world of botany, biology and chemistry, allowing them to monitor the progress of their plants and creating a number of experiments to learn the basics of keeping other organisms alive.
• Gardening is and educational game that will teach your children the basic fundamentals to having responsibility and patience, taking care of their seeds to ensure they grow into healthy plants. This is a slow process too, which makes the moment a flower or sprout appears even more exciting!
• It is more important than ever to promote sustainability and eco-friendly activities within the younger generation, teaching to give back what they take. This is the perfect opportunity to teach your children to protect the planet by talking about pollution, pesticides and most importantly recycling.
• Gardening with your children can also help them learn how to plan and organise, from measuring out the soil and counting the seeds to time management and what the best time of the year is to grow different plants. This can also increase their problem solving skills if any occur along their gardening journey.
• If nothing else, it will enhance your parent-child relationship, an activity you can all do together every day. From deciding what to grow and watching the progress, to cooking up a delicious meal with the freshly grown produce.

What To Plant With Your Children There are many options when choosing what to grow with your little ones, but you should ensure you choose carefully and grow a plant that will thrive with the facilities available to you. So whether you have a large garden, an allotment, a green house or a small window sill – the options really are endless. Gardening inside – we understand that if you’re living in a flat, or you want to give your children a small space on the window sill you need to find plants that grow well at room temperature, that don’t take up too much space. Herbs are great indoor plants, they provide incredible scents as well as easy access for cooking! We suggest rosemary, thyme, sage, parsley and basil. If your children want something with a little more colour then a range of geranium, pansy, petunia and zinnia plants that can all be grown inside, whether kept in the bedroom or on the kitchen windowsill. If you have access to a lot of sunlight inside we suggest trying cherry tomatoes, beans, and berries. Gardening outside – If you are lucky enough to have an allotment space or garden then there are an array of colourful wonders that your children can create. When you are gardening outside you have more options, with more space available to you, you can look at growing root vegetables such as radishes, potatoes and onions. If you want to add a little more colour to your garden, why not try fuchsias, marigolds, forget-me-not or wild strawberries? Sunflowers are also great too, create a friendly competition of who’s can grow taller, encouraging to measure the growth daily. Greenhouse – with a greenhouse the opportunities are endless, increasing speed of germination, giving you many options to what you can plant, including vibrant fruits and vegetables. It also gives the options of sweeter plants, attracting butterflies, ladybirds and other interesting insects that your children can learn about too. The greenhouse effect allows for more tropical foods including mushrooms, cucumbers, peppers, squash, citrus fruits and chillies! You can grow bamboo plants too, if you’re looking for something a little bit different! With everything in life, safety is key. So ensure the correct gardening tools are used, sprays and fertilisers are out of reach and chemicals are kept to a minimum. And on the rare occasion, if the sun is shining, provide shade for your children under an umbrella or cloth, wear sunscreen and sunhat too if necessary. We hope you too got green fingers and found a way to teach your children about when their food comes from and how they can create new life, by giving back to the environment and living a sustainable lifestyle. We would love to know what you planted or any new ideas you may have too! Keep your seedlings and plants in order with our assorted designs of dishwasher, microwave and washing machine safe name labels. We have a variety of fun themed name labels your children absolutely love, from iron-on, stick-on to woven name labels, we have a name label for everything!