Gardening with Your Children

Helping Your Kids Grow Their Own Vegetables

One of the absolute joys of growing your own vegetables is to allow your children to participate in the process.

Children are naturally curious and inquisitive and the whole process of growing seeds or seedlings and watching them grow over a three- four week period to produce fresh vegetables will ensure that the children develop a love of gardening and a fresh vegetables.

Even if you are limited for space in your garden there are still many opportunities available to grow fresh vegetables. They can be grown in tubs, or containers.

There are a few key points that need to be maintained so that the desired results were both fresh vegetables and your children eating them can be achieved.

Establish a children's garden in your own garden this can be done simply by allocating a few small containers to make the task of planting seedlings watering and weeding both easy and enjoyable.

Choose vegetables that are going to grow quickly thus giving the children a quick result for the labour vegetables such as baby carrots spinach, radish, spring onions, lettuce and cherry tomatoes are ideal examples.

Involve your children in the process of selecting vegetables that you wish to plant. Ensure that you have chosen vegetables that will grow in your particular area and a suitable to the climactic conditions.

Make it a fun process and encourage your children to water and we garden which you every day. Collect all the slugs and snails, and keep a small journal. A photographic journal with photos on the refrigerator provides a great diary of how your garden is growing. This will help encourage your children to maintain their enthusiasm and vegetable garden.

When it is harvest time make this a fun activity for your children get them to invite their friends around and have a small harvest festival.

The harvest festival could include a barbecue and the freshly picked vegetables being used in salads.

The next part of the process to ensure that your children develop a love of vegetables is to get them involved in the preparation and presentation of the produce from your garden. There are lots of very simple recipes available that can be used in participation with very young children in the kitchen.

There is nothing more delightful and to sit with your children or your grandchildren preparing a salad or a risotto or some other dish with the majority of the ingredients freshly picked from the children's garden in your own backyard.

Enthusiasm and the joy that your children will experience from growing seeds and seedlings to harvest to preparation of the meals the family in the family's kitchen is an experience that will last with the family for many years. It will also open the door to children's understanding of environmental, and climate issues. You will give them a good understanding as to where produce on a grand scale comes from and how they in their turn and help sustain their own environment.

These are simple steps to ensure that your children will develop a love not only of vegetables but of gardening as well.

If there are any surplus vegetables these can be sold at a farmers market thus generating some additional top-up money we are children.

More information on organic gardening can be found at

http://myknowledgepoint.com/organicgardening