emilycompost - Celebrating gardening, plants, and weeds

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Gardening with Kids

Help Our Planet
(list of things you can do)

TheKidsGarden contains over 60 articles all written by a team of experts and they add around 10 new articles each month.

Homemade Seed Tapes

Making Stepping Stones

Avocado Tree

This is an old favorite:
After using an avocado, save the pit for a future plant.
Using 3 - 4 toothpicks, stick them in the avocado pit.
Place in a jar or glass of water, so only the bottom of the point is in the water.
It may take a while for the foots to appear.
Once there are a fair amount of roots, plant in a pot and place in good bright light.

Book Review:
"Compost! Growing Gardens from Your Garbage"

For a children's garden, add a wooden dinosaur sculpture, or a toad house. Even a pot person, created out of clay pots.

Bug catching is fun - but teach the "catch and release" program.

Children love to work in miniature. Create a terrarium out of a two gallon soda bottle. Mosses, pebbles for walkways, and bark can spark the imagination.

Raising Potatoes

For a fast one-week grow and reaction from children, grow wheat grain or alfalfa seeds.
This can easily be done by using a cereal bowl size container.

Place a folded paper towel.
Sprinkle seeds
Place in a plastic bag & create a mini-greenhouse.
In a week: great sprouts to trim and eat.

Children's Gardening and Other Links:

Kids Valley Garden - A fun place for the little gardener. An easy site to start with.

The Great Plant Escape - The University of Illinois Extension has done a wonderful job in putting this site together. Great Ideas to implement.

KinderGarden - This site is very well organized and just the right spot if one wants to start a school garden.

Crayola Crayon site

The Butterfly Website http://butterflywebsite.com/

The Bug Club at www.ex.ac.uk/bugclub : great for the young entomologist and those not quite so young.