Its Magic  – Children Gardening

It’s so lovely to see and hear about kids gardening and actually taking an interest and enjoying it. Gardening is fun especially when you’re young, it’s like magic. The first seed that you plant out and watch grow, its very special. Not that i can remember what my first plant was as my memory does not go that far back unfortunately. Check out the RHS campaign for school gardening.

Here is a list of plants that as a kid i would love to grow.

Plants for Kids to Grow

• Sweet peas, especially as you have to stake them and they wind in and out of things, plus they smell lovely. Remember to pick the flowers so it encourages more to grow.
• Sunflowers are always great because they are big and have big yellow flowers that follow the sun!
• Pumpkins because they are huge orange things that are great for Halloween! For some reason i can not grow pumpkins, i can however grow marakins. Its cross between a pumpkin and a marrow. My packet of free pumpkin seeds were obviously off. An excuse to give it ago this year. I’ll let you know what happens. Remember they need lots and lots of space!!! if you haven’t got space only sow one seed, 9/10 they will germinate so if you sow  10 you will have to find space for 10 or find a friend to take them or even better sell them.
• Marigolds a little old fashioned but they are bright and pretty. They are so easy to grow and collect the seeds from.
• Trees like Oak yes if it is successful like my brothers oak seedling we had to chainsaw it as it was way too big for the garden. Mum and Dad didn’t realise that it was actually going to grow. Made good fire wood though. Do a bit of googling before you plant a tree, see how big its going to grow and consider the proximity to the house especially willow trees. Be aware of conservation areas  and what you can grow there, because trees are tall they do come into the equation.
• Cress is good a bit boring but you can do it inside which is good for people without a garden.
• Beans are great they again can grow quite tall and are edible.

Older kids might like to grow potatoes, carrots, love in the mist, my favorite and possibly the most popular is Nigella damascena ‘Miss Jekyll‘, Wild strawberry otherwise known as Fragaria vesca, Crane’s-bill, Geranium. There are so many choices of plants to grow from seed the best thing is go to your local garden centre and have a look at their seed collection. On the seed packet it should say difficulty.

It is really important to know about poisonous and dangerous plants. I made the mistake of reading a book i was given some years back now called Wicked Plants The A-Z of Plants that Kill, Maim, Intoxicate and Otherwise Offend, by Amy Steward. Check it out on Amazon. To be honest until now i haven’t really read it until now and i was mesmerised. So many plants that i didn’t even know were dangerous. Check out my next post on Dangerous Plants.