Ways to teach your kids gardening

Growing your own garden is a great way to feed your family healthy, all natural foods. Unlike vegetables found in the grocery store, growing your own garden ensures that you are eating the freshest vegetables. If you have kids and you want to make gardening a family affair, here are some ways you can teach your children how to garden.

1. Start Easy
When teaching your children how to garden, you will want to begin by planting vegetables that are easy to grow. Some of the easier grown vegetables include tomatoes, lettuce, squash, peas, and beans. If you want to grow something easy that isn't a vegetable, why not grow sunflowers? Sunflowers are very easy to grow and the seeds can make a great, all natural snack for your kids.

2. Focus On Fun
If you really want your children to be enthusiastic about gardening, you need to make it fun. Generally, children will not want to do something if it feels like a chore, so it is important that you make gardening a fun and exciting experience.

3. Use Fun Tools
Most stores that sell gardening supplies also sell gardening supplies that specifically cater to children. From smaller sized watering cans in fun colors to tools that are safe for use by little hands, fun and colorful gardening supplies made for children will encourage your children to want to learn more about gardening.

4. Arts And CraftsIf you want to make your garden truly unique while encouraging your children to learn about gardening, have them make garden friendly crafts that can be displayed in your garden. Encourage your children to use their imaginations to think up fun and eye catching garden enhancing crafts.

5. Give Them Space
If you really want to encourage your child to enjoy learning about gardening, give your child his or her own special gardening space. Not only will this teach your child how to accomplish a task independently, but it will also allow your child to have full control over his or her gardening space.

6. Explain
When teaching your child to garden, explain why garden grown vegetables are better than store bought ones. Compare the tastes of vegetables bought in the store and vegetables grown in your garden. Once your child tastes how good garden grown vegetables can be, he or she will want to do more gardening, and eat more vegetables.

7. TeachAll vegetables start out as a seed and that is why it's important to teach your child how to plant seeds properly. Once your child sees how easy it is to plant the seeds, he or she will enjoy learning about gardening.

A garden enables you to enjoy fresh, all natural vegetables from your own backyard. If you want to make gardening fun so that your kids will truly love learning how to grow their own vegetables, the above listed methods will help develop a life long love of gardening for your children.

Guest post by:  Robert McElroy 
Robert McElroy writes about parenting, green living and more at www.healthinsurancequotes.org.