5 Reasons to Start a Garden With Your Children

It’s true that planting and maintaining a garden is hard work. Especially when you consider the fact that you can just go to the grocery store to buy the ingredients you need for your next meal for just a few dollars.

Although having a garden is time-consuming, it is also rewarding. It’s especially rewarding for children.

Whether you have a toddler or your child is already in high school, there are plenty of reasons to start growing a garden with your children.

It’s a Better Way to Get Nutrients

From the vitamin C in oranges to the vitamin A in black elderberries, you can find nutrients all around you! Unfortunately, because most of us don’t take the time to grow our own food, those nutrients are used in supplements and vitamins that we take instead of eating the real thing.

Taking vitamins and supplements is better than nothing, especially if you have a nutrient deficiency, but nothing beats getting nutrients straight from the source.

When you eat fruits and vegetables from your own garden, you’re getting as much nutrition from them as possible. In addition, because you control the pesticides you use, you can also limit your exposure to the deadly chemicals that are frequently used in commercial farming operations that provide food to your local grocery store.

It Encourages Healthy Eating

You can’t blame your kids if they prefer to eat macaroni and cheese from a box over broccoli. Processed foods are designed to be highly palatable, while traditional fruits and vegetables aren’t.

Starting a garden can help. Kids that grow their own vegetables are five times more likely to eat healthy than their peers without vegetable gardens!

Growing food is fun! Kids get to watch as a seed turns into a small plant that then grows the food that they get to pick and put on their plate. Because they’re so involved, they want to eat what they’ve grown, and once they do, they’ll be more likely to eat it again in the future, whether they grew it themselves or not.

Some easy vegetables to grow in your garden with your kids include:

• Tomatoes
• Carrots
• Peas
• Cucumbers
• Potatoes
• Green beans
• Bell peppers

It Can Teach Responsibility

Teaching your child responsibility is no easy task. It often involves persevering through conceptual methods that include modeling responsibility and praising them when you find that they did something responsible on their own. A more concrete way to teach responsibility is by growing a garden.

If you don’t tend to the garden, the food won’t grow, and the entire thing will have been for nothing. This is a fairly simple thing to teach even the youngest children, and because most kids are so motivated to grow their own plants, they’re more than willing to put in the work to make sure they get to harvest their food at the end of the season!

If you find that your child is struggling, make their chores concrete. For example, you may ask your child to water the plants every morning before school and pick weeds on Saturdays.

It’s a Lesson in Patience

If you think teaching responsibility is hard, wait until you try and teach a young child patience! As is the case with teaching responsibility, there are a lot of tips on how to teach patience to children. It includes helping your child develop strategies for waiting or helping them use a timer when it’s appropriate. A simpler method is to grow a garden.

It takes months for fruits and vegetables to develop, but at the end of the season, your child will see that it was all worth the wait.

It’s a Great Way to Create Lasting Memories

Creating memories with your children is important. Unfortunately, many families spend a lot of time in front of the TV, where memories are hardly ever made.

There are tons of ways to make memories with your children, but growing a garden together is a great option. From the memories, they’ll have of planting the first seed to making a meal out of their harvest, and even laughing about failures later, they’ll never forget the time you spent together digging around in the dirt. Hopefully, it’s something they will want to pass onto their children someday.

Planting and maintaining a garden isn’t the easiest thing you can do with your kids, but it’s well-worth it. You’ll have fun, your kids will have fun, and you’ll both learn a lot in the process.