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 Lady Bug Gardening with Children

Gardening with Kids

Kids Gardening

It's hot! The planning and planting is done, the sense of anticipation is a memory, and some kids will drift away from the garden as it, and they, languish in the heat. How does one keep kids active in the garden in the hottest months?

Watering the Critters

One great way to keep the little ones on board is to suggest they consider the creatures that share your garden. The birds, bees, butterflies, and other creatures are hot and thirsty, too, and your children can help them. Keeping the bird baths full is a wonderful project for kids, and it's very satisfying for them to watch the birds drink and bathe in the water they've provided. My three-year-old can identify a number of different bird species from encountering them in and around the garden, and he delights in watching them in the bird bath, as do I. Remind the children that birds may be counting on them for a drink on a hot, dry day, and that they have an important job. You may also see insect pollinators such as bees and wasps ringing the bird bath; remember they're thirsty, too.

Butterflies receive most of their water from nectar, but male butterflies need specific salts for reproduction. An easy way for your child to provide these nutrients for them is to sink a shallow pan into the soil, filling it half with composted manure and half with sand. If you keep it moist throughout the summer, this mud puddle may become a hangout for butterflies. You may also want to provide a flat rock or planter to place in a sunny spot for morning basking as they warm up their muscles in preparation for a day of flying.

As you watch the butterflies enjoying your garden, consider the ways you can optimize their habitat for next year. Butterflies need sun as well as shelter and roosting space in the form of shrubbery. Most butterflies rely on nectar for nutrition, but they don't visit just any flower. They prefer colorful (particularly purple), fragrant, tubular flowers. Some of their favorites include honeysuckle, larkspur, yarrow, butterfly weed, aster (great for providing late fall nutrition), butterfly bush, and phlox. Ask your kids if they've noticed if butterflies are particularly attracted to specific plants in the garden. Butterfly larvae are particularly fond of Queen Anne's lace and milkweed. Children love to gather the silky milkweed seeds in the fall in roadside ditches; be sure to plant some for your butterfly friends. It's extremely important to provided early spring and late fall flowers for them so they can depend on a reliable food source all season long. Brainstorm gardening ideas for next year that will make your garden a friendlier place for butterflies. Put them in your garden journal (see below) and act on them next spring.

Butterflies, as well as many beneficial insects and birds, are sensitive to pesticides. I maintain that a few chewed-up leaves are well worth the overall health of your garden ecosystem, not to mention the planet. Here's another area your kids can help with. My eight-year-old loves to make “potions,” and I enlist his help in making non-toxic but effective sprays to dissuade various cooties from dining on our plants. We take a large peeled clove of garlic or two and carefully poke it all over with the tip of a paring knife. The garlic gets dumped in a spray bottle, which is then filled up with water and left in the sun for a day or two to stew. Then we add a couple pumps of dish liquid, shake it a bit, and then go nuts on the plants (another great kid project.)

Vegetable Practical Jokes

When the little cukes, pumpkins, and zucchini start forming, there is big fun to be had for you and your little ones in the garden! Try inserting a tiny cucumber in a bottle, shading it from the sun so it doesn't burn, and watch as it grows inside the bottle. When is reaches a suitably impressive size, cut the cuke from the vine and amaze your friends as they puzzle how you ever fit that mammoth vegetable through that little hole!

You can make personalized pumpkins! Three weeks before picking (mid-September-ish), select a pumpkin and clean it with a 10% bleach and water solution. Then, take a craft knife and etch a word or design about 1/32 inch deep. You can practice on an apple to make sure you don't go too deep. For detailed patterns, try using a power drill. When you're happy with your design, wipe the scarred pumpkin with the bleach solution every couple of days to keep insects and infection away. Your design should scar over in time for picking and be ready to amaze your friends by Halloween.

And, of course, you can take a cue from Zachary Beany and try your hand at making some weird and wacky zucchini sculptures. Just grab a few zucchini (trust me, no one will miss them) and let your imagination go wild. Empty your crafts box and junk drawer and see what you can find that will make the most creative and hilarious zucchini sculpture. You can use Tinkertoys to make wheels for an excellent zucchinimobile, or carve it out like a pumpkin for an unexpected jack-o-lantern. You get the idea.

Garden Journals

One last deep-summer thought for little (and big) ones in the garden: the garden journal. Up to this year, I have considered them to be a time-eater designed to give gardeners with no life something to do when they're not gardening. After all, I have journals for each of my kids that go untouched for months at a time. But this year I figured out the catch: unlike with kids, with the garden journal, you can make notes and observations from this year that can help you get it right next year. (Too bad you can't do that with potty training.)

I'm finally seeing the pattern of mistakes, and, yes, successes, that I would do well to remember in years to come before it's too late to correct problems, again. For example, I have a bed that for two years in a row has been overtaken with larkspur and clary sage. It's gorgeous in June, but by mid-July, it's looking bedraggled and, frankly, lame. At that point it's too late to plant anything else, and the tired, brownish larkspur and clary sage have crowded out the cosmos seedlings that would have been so lovely had I remembered to provide them some air and light. So for two years (this will be three) I've had a gorgeous flower bed until mid-July, at which point it looks like a semi-arid wasteland of brown, skeletal larkspur and clary sage. By putting this problem in writing this year, I can be reminded next year to be much more ruthless in thinning and make sure to allow some cosmos to come up, thrive, and take the place of the you-know-what in late summer.

While you're dutifully journaling your garden disasters and successes, make sure you let the kids in on the fun. You can let them provide the illustrations for your own journal (a dramatic rendering of my late-summer floral train wreck by my eight-year-old would be enough to prompt anyone to remedy the situation immediately.) Or, provide them with their own journals in which to make their own observations. My kids have pointed out that our sunflower house is not doing exactly what we had hoped and expected, and some good journaling on the situation could really help us figure things out for next year. The journals are great for kids in the winter, too, when they can help plan next year's garden in the form of drawings, lists, charts, and collages cut from seed catalogs.

So those are a few ideas to help you and your kids brave the midsummer heat in the garden, and have fun doing it. Bye for now!

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