Designing a kitchen garden with your kids
Designing a child-friendly kitchen garden gives children the opportunity to have fun, take ownership and become leaders from the very beginning.
Why encourage your kids to be involved in the garden? Involving children in the garden helps them develop confidence, curiosity and a strong connection with nature.
Gardening encourages healthy eating as children are more willing to try vegetables they have grown themselves.
It also supports their mental health and wellbeing, and promotes physical activity through digging, weeding, planting and pushing the wheelbarrow. Being out in the garden boosts kids’ creativity with activities like designing a fairy garden, building bug hotels or making nature-inspired artworks for the garden.
Many children may not realise while they’re out in the garden, but they are also supporting their environmental learning through hands-on experiences and questioning about nature.
How to design a garden with your kids:
Start by considering the space.
Will they join an existing vegetable patch or have their own garden?
Support their design process with a notebook, camera or voice recorder, encouraging them to “observe and interact”.
Ask them to track sunlight, wind direction, rain puddles, shade and permanent structures.
Take them on garden excursions to botanical gardens, friends’ veggie patches and community gardens.
Visit the local farmers’ market or garden centre, allowing them to choose seeds and seedlings.
Garden beds can be created using no-dig methods, hügelkultur, wicking beds, pots, straw bales or raised beds – the choice depends on space, budget and preference.
– Happy gardening from Denise & Jodie
1Plants that capture children’s attention include:
- Three Sisters: Breakthrough sweet corn, Sunset Runner climbing beans and Butternut pumpkin
- Radish: French Breakfast for quick growth
- Carrots: Kyoto Red for colour and sweetness
- Potatoes: Dutch Cream
- Peas: Sugar snap and snow peas for eating straight from the vine
- Tomatoes: Black Cherry and Blue Berries
- Strawberry: Chandler for size and sweetness
- Raspberry: Heritage’ for its long harvest
- Herbs: Create a perennial herb spiral.
2Garden jobs for spring:
- Plant, feed and prepare your garden for months of harvesting ahead.
- Add compost and well rotted manure to your garden beds.
- Top up mulches (pea straw, lucerne mulch).
- Plant strawberries, feed them and apply straw mulch.
- Plant new citrus trees or fertilise your existing trees as new growth appears.
- Plant flowers to encourage pollinators: calendula, nasturtiums, borage, alyssum and cosmos.
- Create an espaliered apple or pear tree.
- Sow herbs of basil, dill, coriander and thyme.
- Sow veggie seeds of beans, carrots and capsicums.
- Plant seed potatoes and prepare for a spud treasure hunt with the kids.
- Construct a tee-pee for climbing beans.
- Get arty and creative by constructing some signs/plant labels for the veggie gardens.
- Create a pizza garden: design a circular garden bed and divide it into eight sections/pieces. In each piece plant a different plant/seed that you can use on a pizza. Suggestions include; tomatoes, basil, oregano, thyme, capsicum and spring onions.
