Basic Creativity with Kids: 6 Steps to Growing Things with Kids

Spring is here! Although we try to grow plants at various times of the year, we do not miss spring time as another opportunity to be mini gardeners.

We talk about how important it is to take care of our Earth and our food supply. We talk about how long it takes to grow food and why we should not be wasteful. We do not always have a lot of luck with continuing to grow things to bear fruit or vegetables for us to eat. (We live in AZ where it gets a lot hotter than I am used to and we just tend to forget to water them.) But we continue to improve on our growing skills and patience.

Here are the basic steps to growing things with kids:

Step 1. Go to the store and let them pick a few different seed packets - vegetables or flowers. They pick the ones that they love to eat or the ones that look the biggest. We talk about where they grow best and how long it will take them to grow. We look at all the different options and each take turns picking our selection. Each child was able to pick 3 packets, which we will use throughout the year.

A few of the options we selected for this year.

Step 2. Obtain a few containers. Pots, buckets, or mini plastic green houses. We have found that the plastic mini green houses seem to work best for those that may forget to water their seeds everyday or have a hard time not touching them once they are planted, but it requires transferring them a little sooner as well. We also find that basically any containers can be used. My favorite choices are ecofriendly solutions that we will try next time:

Newspaper pots from Cottage Hill

Toilet paper Rolls from Domestica

Step 3. Clean a place for them to prepare the dirt and let them do all the work.

Step 4. Either fill the container with enough water to loosen up all the dirt or do this in a separate container and transfer the dirt to the pot later. We found transferring the dirt later was much more fun...but always a little messier.

Step 5. Label the containers with the seeds that you have planted. In our case, the packets of 5 different containers were moved before I had a chance to write on them, so we will try to figure it out as they grow. Either do this before you start the process with filling with dirt or well after you know what you planted. Another option is to create seed matching cards to determine what the seeds are. An incredibly creative mom and former teacher from The Golden Gleam has a great idea we will try another day.