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6 Rules for Children’s Gardens
1.
Keep it small. Even a 2’ by 2’ or a 3’ by
3’ garden will seem large to a small child. A
child’s first few gardens should be just big enough
for a few carefully selected plants. The location
should be in the children's’ part of the yard,
perhaps near a swing set. It will help to define it
clearly with some edging or boards (don’t use any
chemically treated boards or timbers, though. )
2.
Make it a summer garden. Don’t start a
children’s garden until early summer, when
temperatures are consistently warm. Seeds will
germinate quickly, and I even suggest planting
bedding plants that are already blooming. Don’t
expect the interest to continue much after school
begins in the fall—too much other stuff going on by
then.
3.
No adults allowed. It’s OK to show your
child a few of the basic gardening techniques,
especially if they ask you to. But then, let their
garden be their project. A properly disinterested
parent will likely be invited to a number of summer
“garden walks”, and for these special occasions,
adults are allowed.
4.
Pick fun & easy plants. It’s hard to go
wrong with a simple selection of some of the
favorite flowers and vegetables from your own
childhood garden—moss rose, snapdragons, petunias,
sunflowers, tomatoes, string beans—try a mixture of
easy to grow seeds and bedding plants.
5.
Let nature happen. I suggest no chemical
pesticides or herbicides of any sort in a children’s
garden. A little fertilizer is just fine—so long as
the child is putting it on. Pulling a few weeds,
watching bees and butterflies stealing nectar from
the flowers, and roly-polys scurrying around in the
mulch are all part of the experience of a childhood
garden. Give that child a magnifying glass or a
microscope to see some of the smaller stuff that
lives in a garden and you just might end up with a
Nobel-prize winning microbiologist in the family.
6.
Add a little water. A shallow container like
a saucer for a large flower pot would make an
excellent (and inexpensive) ground level bird bath
in a child’s garden. It would increase the
likelihood of bird, butterfly, and insect visits to
the garden.
Finally, anything grows. Remember, these rules are
for the parents, not the child. In the child’s
garden there are no rules for the child. So if you
follow all the rules, your child’s summertime garden
might just turn out to be their summer’s school.
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