Children love gardening and summer is a great time for them to experience success, because everything is growing so fast.
I find that children love to grow things to eat, so tomatoes, lettuce and carrots are always favourites in our garden. Radishes are good because they grow so fast. Start a row of radishes, and then a week or two later start a new row with a fresh sprinkle of seeds, this will ensure that you have a constant supply of radishes throughout the summer.
A strawberry plant is popular, and my children like to beat the ants and slugs to the strawberries. Apple cucumbers are a treat and easy to grow too.
Flowers are easy and fun to grow. Choose calendula for colour, sunflowers for size, swan plants to attract Monarch butterflies, sweet peas to grow well in a pot. Here are instructions for your children for them to grow their own plants.
Grow Sweet Peas
- Get a large, deep (at least 30 cm) diameter pot with drainage holes and fill it with potting mix, press down and water thoroughly.
- Plant about four or five dwarf sweet pea seedlings in the pot. Keep your pot in a sunny position and pinch off the tips of the stems to make the plants bush out.
- Keep watering the plants and enjoy the beautiful sweet smelling flowers. These flowers are good for picking and keeping in a vase. The watering is very important, especially for plants in pots during the summer.
- Pinch off the dead flowers to encourage more flowers.
At the end of the summer your children can save seeds to use next year.
Grow a Tent
- Choose a sunny spot for your tent.
- Get some two-metre-long bamboo poles and stick them firmly in the ground to mark the tent.
- Tie the top of the poles together to make a tepee shape. Add some string around the poles to provide a ‘ladder’ for the plants.
- If you want to make it a really good tent, put bird netting on the poles for the plants to grow over. The bird netting gives lots of support for the growing plants.
- Grow beans, morning glories, sweet peas, whatever vines you like. It makes a lovely, green, shaded fort on hot summer days.
- Add to the fun by having a “race” to see whose vine reaches the top first.
- Another easy “fort” can be made simply by planting tall sunflowers around a rectangle, leaving an open space for the door.
Grow Tiny Things
- Try baby carrots
- New potatoes
- Cherry tomatoes
- Apple cucumbers
Grow Giant Things
- Giant sunflowers
- Pumpkins
- Leave a courgette to grow into a marrow
- Watermelon
Save Seeds
- You can collect seed from sweet peas, pansies, sunflowers and others. Leave a few flowers on the plant to allow the flowers to develop seed heads.
- Pick the seeds when they turn from green to brown, put them in a paper bag and store them in a warm place to allow them to dry out completely for a few days.
- Then save the seeds in a zip-lock bag, and put the bags in envelopes, write the name of the seed, the date and draw a picture on the envelope to remind you of what is inside.
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