As Spring is starting to come in and it’s getting a little bit warmer out there, it’s time to start thinking about how to make sure your kids are getting the most out of all that sunshine and fresh air.
There’s nothing wrong with having indoor hobbies of course, but it’s important that kids learn the value of spending time outside from an early age and this is the perfect opportunity for you to start working that into their lives.
So there’s a lot of different activities that they can partake in outside and one of the most beneficial ones is gardening. This is a terrific hobby to have because not only is it fun and rewarding, but it’s also something that requires a great deal of effort and hard work.
Gardening can help kids to develop a whole bunch of skills from patience to determination and can also teach them about responsibility. And all of this is while they’re getting exercise and enjoying the sunshine.
It can be a hard sell for a lot of kids who are probably more interested in running around and climbing trees and that’s if they actually want to go out at all. A lot of them might just want to play video games or aimlessly surf the internet.
What you need to do is attract them to the hobby by showing them how much fun it can actually be. Here are a few ways that you can do that:
Involve Them in Choosing Seeds
Don’t just start things in the garden, your kids will feel more involved in the process if they can be there at the very beginning of it. So take them to the garden center with you, it will also add in an outing as part of the experience,
The great thing about this is that when you’re shopping for and choosing seeds, there will usually be an example of the finished project available for your kids to see which will entice them to try and develop it for themselves.
If you just take them out into an empty garden, present them with a plot of land and then give them seeds to plant, it’s not going to feel like a particularly exciting prospect. They plant the seeds, leave them there and then nothing happens for a while.
But if you show them what it will eventually turn into, how the life cycle of a plant goes and allow them to choose which plants they personally want to grow, all of a sudden it’s something that will lead to a beautiful result that they can watch come together over time.
You have to make sure that they are choosing stuff that actually has a chance to flourish in the environment. Kansas City is in USDA zone 6 in the USA’s hardiness zone designations and there’s some great stuff that’s perfectly suited to this zone.
For the most part you should leave the choice up to the kids, but supervise it a little bit so that they don’t end up too disappointed by some plants which don’t reach their full potential.
Make Things Colourful
Kids love colour. It’s an undisputed fact and I don’t really know why that is but if you walk into a toy store what are you going to see? Many, many bright colors. And I’m sure you remember the rush of excitement you got when you walked in there as a kid yourself.
Your garden will be colorful too once things actually start growing, so your kids will have that end result to look forward to. Until then though, there are other ways you can inject a bit of color into the experience.
Colorful tools are one thing you can do. Something your kids will need for gardening is a lot of different kinds of tools anyway, things like spades, buckets, hand trowels, and rakes so try and get ones that are bright colors.
Show The Results Off
Ultimately, if you and your child do manage to grow some nice stuff, you should let the whole world know. People will see the garden obviously but let it be common knowledge that your kids put a lot of work into it too.
This will only add to the sense of accomplishment that they feel. They’ll be getting compliments and praise and people will be engaging with them in discussions about their choice of flowers and how they maintained them.
Because gardening is something that people of all ages participate in, kids can feel on par with the adults in their life because they’ve achieved something similar to what these adults may have achieved.
And if you wanted to, you could even start up an Instagram page for your kids’ gardening projects. They’ll love watching the likes and comments roll in.
I don’t know why gardening gets a reputation for being a boring hobby for old people, there’s so much more to it than people realize. And if you get your kids into it they could potentially discover a worthwhile activity that they can enjoy for a lifetime.
