GARDENING JOBS FOR KIDS
by Julie Ward
Discouraged because you can't get your children interested in gardening? Here are a few ideas for enlisting your children's help in the yard without overwhelming them with all the weeding and waiting that traditional gardening entails.
Critter Control
If you have a snail problem, give your kids an empty coffee can and the promise of money for filling it with snails. Age and experience will probably dictate the pay rate, somewhere between a quarter per can and a dime per snail.
What do you do with all the snails once the kids have gathered them? Your own level of compassion will determine your disposal method, but another way to get the kids back to nature is to take them to a nearby creek or park for a snail release celebration. Children can also set traps for pill bugs, those other common garden noshers. Set small containers, such as the bottoms you cut off of yogurt cups or milk cartons, into the soil around the plant you want to protect. Open a can of beer, and let your kids pour it into the traps. In the morning, the kids can empty the flat beer and pill bug carcasses into the compost pile.
Water Play
Watering the flowerbeds is a natural way for kids to help in the garden. They might have trouble regulating the flow of the water, so save your plants and soil from a pounding by attaching a nozzle with a gentle shower setting to the garden hose.
Of course, the kids always end up completely soaked too, so this is a good end-of-the-day chore, when they're about to take their clothes off and jump in the tub anyway.
Flower Power
Arranging flowers is a traditional Montessori activity. It helps children develop motor skills, vocabulary, aesthetic sense and a deeper relationship with nature. You don't need an elaborate cutting garden--a patch of zinnias that you grow from seed will provide plenty of blooms from mid-summer until frost. You don't have to spend a fortune on vases, either. If you keep a few empty containers, such as plastic peanut butter jars and soup cans with the labels removed, you'll have humble but charming vases in which your children can arrange flowers.
Use these arrangements on your dinner table, or give them away to teachers, neighbors and friends with new babies. Your children will learn the magic and civility that a gift of flowers brings, to both giver and receiver.
Wheelbarrows for Work...and Fun
Your children can help you clean up the yard before you cut the grass by pushing the wheelbarrow and collecting toys, rocks, sticks and other debris. When everything is put away, you can reward them for a job well done by giving them their own wheelbarrow rides.
Wave to Your Kids from the Garden
They might be more interested in toys and friends now, but if your children see you happily working in the yard and enhancing your family's life with the things that you grow, chances are they'll turn into gardeners someday. It worked in my mom's case--she never invited me to garden with her, and the idea of planting seeds or tending plants never occurred to me when I was a child. But growing flowers and vegetables was her hobby, and now it is mine. I won't be at all surprised if my sons discover gardening someday.
Related Links & Resources
Doggy Design
Use your dog's running path as the basis for your garden design.
Back to School with Plants
8 Plants that even the blackest of thumbs can successfully grow in their dorm rooms.
Harvesting Seeds
Forget shopping. A little botany lesson is all you need for a d.i.y. seed collection.
Garden of Weedin'
Strategies for fighting weeds.
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