Gardening with Kids: 3 compelling reasons why you must do it
Does gardening get you scenes of dirt, muck, worms & gooey nails to reach your wash basin with after you’re done with it? Well, for me, gardening was just that until I got the first ever potted plant to my own apartment after marriage. It was a Tulsi plant & having it in my balcony just came as a customary suggestion to any married couple in India. Well, honestly, then it wasn’t my love for plants & we’d just water the shrub twice a day as a ritual. However, from that to having a tiny but loved bunch of 6 potted friends in my balcony today, I feel a certain breeze of peace while saying that gardening with kids is something that we all should do.
My parents treat their home garden as their second child(ren) & would spend any chunk of time planting, examining & raising beautiful plants, trees, herbs & just watching them grow right. Nevertheless, whenever they’d engage with the garden, I would just roll my eyes & wonder what ‘human’-like connection they felt with it.
Cut to now & I feel how fabulous they must have pictured gardening with kids would be. Because I approve of the fact that raising a life just next to you is absolutely bliss! And involving your children in here has undeniably amazing benefits of doing that.
Although I don’t own a huge collection of plants around my home, which is just another apartment in the city of Bangalore, I’ve got a select favorite ones in my balcony & they’re, as of now, enough for me to feel extremely pacifying while I water or add manure to them along with my 5 year old.
So here are 3 perfect reasons, according to me, why you should be gardening with kids:
1. Gardening with Kids sensitizes them to Life
Gardening involves the process of seeding, watering & caring. Sometimes, fruition too! Isn’t that what life exactly is?
We create ideas, work hard towards realizing them & enjoy their results. That’s how our life goals typically shape up. Your child gets to absorb this essence of life & learns to appreciate plans, efforts & end results. Also, during times when some or none of our seeds germinate, they learn to see disappointing outcomes & infer that life is pretty much similar!
2. Teaches Patience
Kids are innately impatient creatures. Period. And that makes it very challenging for us to imbibe patience in them. They never wait for you to finish cooking before serving. Neither can they wait for you to pay for some stuff at the counter before ripping the cover open.
Gardening with kids makes them realize that nice things take time to show up. Like seeding a plant, taking precautions over proper bunding & recognizing efforts of watering the soil everyday & nourishing the plant right from germination till it’s alive teaches a major life lesson – PATIENCE. In the most clear, practical & unintended way.
3. Collateral Education
What else can educate your kid& agriculture about horticulture than growing a tiny garden in your own house? Now whether it’s about cultivating ornamental flowers, simple vegetables or medicinal plants, gardening with kids is the best way to make them aware of the first phase to the end results of reaping benefits from organic home produce.
All the more, it’s through gardening that your kids can understand & appreciate the value of medicinal & therapeutic plants better. Such as the Tulsi, Aloe Vera, Lemon grass etc.
I have a tiny collection of Tulsi, Aloe Vera, Coriander, Hibiscus, Green chilly & a perennial shrub. And when we’re down with cough or skin bruises, my daughter knows that the Tulsi leaves & natural Aloe Vera gel are going to come handy.
As part of my suggestion & personal experience, I’d want to recommend the Gate Garden gardening kit to get your child used to. The kit has a modest but good collection of seeds & basic equipment to get started with gardening. I found it great for my kid who already was fascinated with watering plants. 🙂
Do you indulge in & enjoy gardening with kids too? Do share with me in the comments.
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A very different blog I read lately. Never thought about how gardening can help our kids. Made me think. Excellent post.
We grew up in a home with a large garden where all the gardening was done by my parents and my grandfather. We picked up so many intricacies like budding and grafting and how much water which plant needs. Now we live in a flat where all I can have are potted plants, mostly greens because we don’t get enough sunlight for most flowering plants. But those greens are my happiness. I agree we must involve children. It encourages them to be outdoors and takes them away from the gadgets too.
Making gardening in the home ground is a very good decision. Because kids are learning much more knowledge about nature and punctuality. Your blog says the actual thing that happened nowadays. I will surely follow up this for making a Gardening Army each of Kids. Thanks