There are many ways you can enjoy nice outdoor activities as a family, but gardening can be one that combines both physical exercise and family activities. This will let you involve your kids and the family in general, so you can enjoy your days, making them more interesting overall. Landscaping and gardening can be a great way to bring the family together, especially if you take the time to make it an organized effort you can all enjoy. The following examples will explain how you can do just that without going way too far in terms of organizing and work involved:
Kids are often short in height, which means they will be much closer to the ground than the rest of us, so this would let them have fun during gardening alongside you. They can get to know the plant life and bugs in the garden, as they can find out more alongside you. This should help with the kids’ observational skills and more, so give them a chance to find out more. Letting kids find out more about where most of their food comes from can be both educational and fun, as long as you do it the right way. This will help out a lot, especially if the whole family does gardening every once in a while.
If you want to involve the kids in landscaping and gardening, you will need to do some serious thinking and decisions about organizing the effort in such a way as to avoid it being hard on them. The essentials you will have to deal with should cover what the kids can do during gardening, but you should begin with some narrow beds the kids can use when they work on gardening with you. The shorter beds will be easier on them since they won’t need to reach too far, giving them the chance to work on things with ease instead of struggling as you go about the garden. Give them one small spot of the place they can use for their own gardening experiments, planting trees and more as they choose to. With this you will have an easier time overall.
Once you decide what you want to have growing in the garden, you should take care to see what types of plants will be safe for your kids and family. Plant crops that are sturdy and capable of surviving a long time, ones that will not need way too much care to thrive in the long run. Just grab a gardening book and some seed packets and you will have an excellent first step toward a successful gardening setup you and your kids can enjoy. Use radishes as a beginner’s plant your kids can help with and give them enough irrigation to make them thrive again.
While gardening is fun, kids will also need a place where they can just dig and have fun just shoveling dirt and checking for bugs and the like. Look at bugs together, try to explain what they are, look them up on the web and learn together.
If your kids will be a part of it, then you will need to handle getting some child-sized tools instead. You should try to find some tools that would allow your kids to feel like they are real gardeners. Even plastic shovels and spoons would work in some situations, so feel free to use them if need be.
Why secret? Well for starters your kids will really enjoy having a place of their own. It can be a tree house or something similar, a place where they grow sunflowers or something similar that would make it work. You can make some animals out of chicken wire, training ivy to climb around them and you will have some good looking topiary as well.
You can find a location behind a tree where you can dig a hole in the ground. Add some peels and rinds from fruit, tea bags, coffee grounds, eggshells and so forth and when it turns crumbly and dark in a few months, you can mix this into the soil for fertilizer. Teach the kids to compost and your gardening and landscaping will flourish.