If you have a garden at home, getting your kids to help you in it can be both fulfilling and enjoyable for everyone involved. However, just having your kids putter around won’t be that particularly helpful for you. Rather, if you can teach your kids a few gardening basics, the time they spend in the garden with you can be useful and educational for everyone involved.
To help you with this, here are three things to teach your kids about helping in the garden.
Identifying Weeds
For larger weeds or vegetation that you need removed, it’s usually best to do this yourself or even leave it to a professional. But for the smaller weeds in your garden, even your young kids can help you remove them. The trick here is being able to identify what is a weed and what isn’t.
In the most broad sense of the term, a weed is anything growing where you don’t want it to grow. So if you’re wanting your kids to help you weed the garden, you’ll need to teach them what the plants you’re growing look like. Then, when they see anything that doesn’t look like those plants, they can pull the weeds out. Just make sure you teach them to pull out the entire plant of the weed. Otherwise, the weeds will just keep growing and growing.
Rules For Watering
Watering can also be a great thing for your kids to help you with in the garden. However, kids often get a little over excited when given a hose or watering can to take to the plants. And when this happens, it can be easy for your plants to get overwatered and wind up having a harder time growing. For this reason, it’s vital that you set up some rules for watering the plants in your garden.
As for when to water your garden, teach your kids to water in the early morning and late evening when the temperature is lower and there will be less evaporation of the water. And when pouring on the water, teach your kids to put the water down by the roots rather than just pouring the water onto the leaves of the plants.
The Satisfaction Of Growing Foods They Love
Something else that you can teach your kids about gardening is that they can plant foods that they love and find joy and fulfillment in caring for the garden until the food is ready for them to eat. So when it comes time to plant in your garden, let your kids choose some of the plants that you cultivate so that they can get excited about helping in the garden and eating healthy foods.
If you’re wanting your kids to help you in the garden, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you teach them how to best do this.
