10 Screen-Free Garden Activities for Kids This Summer

Foreign. It is summertime, and that means we've got kids at home and we've got to find some things for them to do. Today, I want to tell you 10 of my favorite summertime activities for kids in the garden. I started my garden way back when my kids were tiny. I had preschoolers and babies and. And it's been incredible to grow my garden through the years with my kids as they've grown up. Now they're teenagers and things have completely changed. But I want to bring you back to the days when my kids were younger and show you 10 different projects you could do with your own kids this summer. If they're tiny, if they're toddlers, even if they're teenagers. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nicole Burke. I'm the founder and owner of Gardener Incorporated. And we're on a mission at Gardenary to make gardening ordinary. And who better to start with than kids? In fact, kids, I think, are the world's best gardeners. They have no fear, no shame, and no one has yet told them that they don't have a green thumb. So it is the perfect age to start the world off as gardeners, and this summer is the best time to make it happen. I am so thankful. I've made a million mistakes as a parent, but the one thing I did right is I started a garden when my kids were small. And so if you're watching this and you've got kids or grandkids or you know someone who's got kids, you gotta tell them to watch this episode and start a garden with their kids this summer. So the very first project that is so easy and so fun to do with kids is to grow beans. Beans are one of the plants that grow so easily from seed and so quickly, and. And they're a very fast growing plant. So they're going to give your kids exactly what they need, which is immediate gratification, right? Because we've all. If you've got kids or you've been around kids, or if you've been a kid before, you know that we want to have what we want right away. And beans are going to make that happen. So growing beans is so fun. You can do it super simply just in a little container. You could do it in a grow bag, you could do it in a pot on a porch or patio, or you could take it to the next level. And this is what I did with my kids a few years back, more than a few years back, maybe about eight or nine or 10 years ago, we made A bean teepee. So this is so fun and easy. You can do this even if you don't have a raised bed. You're simply going to take some steaks. We just got bamboo steaks. I was in Mississippi with my parents and brought back all these big bamboo stakes. Dig down into the ground, make a circle with these bamboo stakes, and have them all go up right to the center, and then right along the edge of those stakes, you're going to plant vining beans. Not bush beans, pole beans. So in the pots, in the containers, even in your raised bed, it's great to grow bush beans for your kids. But for this project, you want to grow pole beans because you want those beans to literally vine up those bamboo stakes. They're going to bush out, have lots of leaves on them and flowers and eventually beans. And. And it is a magical thing for kids to crawl under, read books in, have fun, play, pretend. Pretend like it's their house in the woods with a nice little bean teepee. So beans I love to grow on a bean teepee. First is hyacinth bean. Now, you have to be careful with this one because it's not edible. In fact, it will make you sick, I think so. Hyacinth bean, though, is beautiful, and it grows into hot weather. So if you're watching this in the summers where you live are in the high 90s, then hyacinth bean is a great bean to grow if it's super hot. Another one that's great to grow if it's super hot is the yard long bean. This bean is crazy. It's literally 15, 18 inches long. It also can survive when the weather is really warm. And then if you're in more of a mild norm, like I was going to say normal, that's rude. Like, average temperatures for summer, something like 75, 85, just barely hitting 90. You can grow just like normal pole beans. So Kentucky wonder contender beans. And those will vine up. You could do purple beans, yellow beans, you can mix it up. But that is a super fun, easy summer project you can do with your kids. If you don't do any other ones, do that one. Project number two is to grow some sunflowers. Also grows super quickly from seed. Listen, this was successful for me in my first year of gardening when my daughter, my oldest daughter was four, I had two babies and a son in the middle, and. And we were successful. So if I can do it, you can do it, and so can your kids. Sunflowers grow so easily from seed. You want to make sure that You've got a nice place where you can kind of dig in and prep the soil for those sunflowers. Make sure you're on level ground. The one mistake we made the first summer we grew them is we planted the seeds on a slope. And so the first time a big Tennessee summer storm came through, it just washed all those seeds right down the hill along with the water. So plant your seeds on a nice level ground. And it's super fun to do all different kinds of sunflowers, but you definitely want to try some of the mammoth sunflowers. I'll have to share some photos with you in this episode of our first sunflowers. I don't think we got very much out of that first garden, but we definitely had super, super tall sunflowers. So growing those with kids is so fun to watch. Take a picture every week with your kid alongside the sunflower as it grows. And by the end of the summer, you're going to have this 8, 10 foot tall sunflower and your tiny little kid underneath. It's kind of amazing and precious, and I wish I had a better camera for when that was happening for me. So get yourself some good sunflower seeds. If you want to do mini sunflowers, those are fun, too. Teddy bear sunflowers are my favorite miniature sunflowers to grow, but large ones are going to be a big wow for your kids. Super fun. And they get to watch this thing go from seed to flower, back to seed. So you get to show them the whole process in one season. It's pretty amazing. Project number three is to create a toad habitat. We did this, and we didn't even know it. So I don't know if you know, but toads are a wonderful benefit to the garden. They eat lots of insects, and they're a friend that you want to have right alongside your garden space. And if your kids or anything like my kids, and they love toads. I mean, my kids would chase and grab and hold toads as often as they possibly could. They thought toads were just magical little creatures. So. Yeah. And they never got warts. I think that's like a thing, right, that people talk about. Anyway, you can create a toad home. So essentially, you could do a little natural sunk pond. You can get something as simple as a bucket. But if you could also get one of those nice little pond fillers, dig in the ground a little bit, and you literally just set the little structure right there in the soil, fill it up with some water, add some rocks, you can add some water plants and You've just created a little habitat so that toads will want to live near your garden. They're going to lay their eggs, grow tadpoles in that water, and then they are going to multiply and make more toads. Now, we would create little toad homes. We would take, like, broken terracotta pots and things like that, turn them on their side. And toads love that coverage and that shelter, especially underneath plants. So we would go underneath, say, our pollinator plants or our grasses and native plants, and just put some of our broken terracotta pots, turn them on their side, and boom, you've got a little toad home. So create those around your garden space and then task your children with going out and doing some observation every day to see if the toads have shown up. And. And they definitely will show up if you're going to have that little water feature where you have a place for them to come and lay their eggs and make more toads. All right, project number four is to grow potatoes. If it's too hot where you live to grow potatoes this summer, grow some sweet potatoes. Potatoes and sweet potatoes can both grow just straight in the ground. You don't need a raised bed. You don't need a container. These plants are so forgiving, and it's really amazing to dig potatoes or sweet potatoes at the end of the summer with your kids. So back to that very first summer with my kids, when pretty much everything else was a fail. My husband, Jason had the idea to plant potatoes, and I'm so glad he did. We were just growing right in ground. He brought in some seed potatoes right in the middle of July. So we were super late to be planting potatoes here in Nashville. It was warm there. It was like 85, 90 degrees already. We just planted the potatoes in a row, had the kids do it. We didn't do any of the chitting or the slicing up. You can, but kids really don't usually have a lot of patience for that. So we literally just gave them the potato, stuck it in the ground, put a little bit of compost on top, and then watch those plants take off. Fast forward to the end of summer, right around end of August, beginning of September, Jason, my husband, grabbed some beach buckets and we went along the row. We gave the kids each a little kid shovel. They all dug up, pulled up their potatoes, filled up their beach buckets, and then we did a weigh in to see who grew the most potatoes from the potatoes they planted a few months before. So, like I said, if it is too warm for you to Grow potatoes. If you're in a hot climate, sweet potatoes are a great alternative. To grow a sweet potato, you want to have a slip. Now you could actually just plant the sweet potato as is so you don't have to get too fancy. But if you want to get a little fancier, you could start with the sweet potato inside, stick it in some water and let it start to create leaves off the side of the tuber. And then once that happens, you cut those leaves off, including the root, and that's called a slip. And you literally just plant that slip, boom, into the soil. And that will grow sweet potatoes underground as well. Both of these plants are going to grow loads of leaves, so it's entertaining. Even while you wait for the roots to grow. For a potato, you're just going to get like a bush above the ground. For a sweet potato, it's going to vine and go everywhere. And the cool thing is those sweet potato leaves are edible. So you can just let your kid add it. They can go out, play with those sweet potato vines and, you know, have themselves some lunch too. Project number five is to keep a garden journal. At the start of the summer, go to the store and get maybe some composition books or just some little cheap journals from Target or Walmart or somewhere in the dollar aisle and then bring it home and let your kids put their art skills to the test by homemaking a cover on that journal and making it their own garden journal. And then have them every day head out to the garden and just journal out what's happening. Just write down the date and write down the things that are going on outside in the journal. Depending on what age your kid is, what their abilities are, what their interests are, they could draw things from the garden. They could sketch them out. If you've got a teenager or a preteen, I mean, you could absolutely give them like some better quality tools. You could give them some charcoals or some nice ink pens. I love drawing with like a micron where the lines are really, really nice and narrow and have them go draw a plant from the garden each and every day. So garden journals are an incredible way to just slow down and still time. And if you're trying to work in some non screen time for your kids and you don't necessarily want to have to be the one that's like, you know, entertaining them or telling them what to do out in the garden, literally give them a journal and let them go fill it up each and every day. And that could be, I don't know, like the thing they have to turn into you before they get their screens or before they get their breakfast or, you know, I don't know, you. You can be the parent. But a garden journal is a fantastic way to get them connected to what's going on out there. And at the end of the season, you're going to have the most amazing document that shows the progress of the garden and all the things that happen. If I could turn back time, I would 100% have gotten my 4 and 5 year olds to keep garden journals in those summers when I was trying to come up with all kinds of things for them to do every day. I think they would have loved the creativity, and I would love to have those now to look back on and see all the things they wrote and drew. Project number six is to grow melons. We also did this in our second summer with my kids. I wrote about this in my book, Leaves, Roots, and Fruit. It wasn't successful. All right, hear me out. It didn't work, but we had a lot of fun trying. So growing melons, whether it's honeydew or cantaloupe or watermelon, is a super fun project for kids. It is going to take some time and attention on their part, especially the watering. But you can do it simply by using a big grow bag. You could grow it outside of your raised bed, or you can create a mound in the soil and actually grow the melons just right there in the ground, even if you don't have a formal garden set up yet. So you do want to prep a really nice big mound. I would give yourself at least 1, 2, 3 square feet where you don't have grass and you've got just some nice soil that's been amended with some compost and maybe some sand. And you're going to plant the seed for the melon right there in the middle. And then you're going to have your kid watch and take care of that seed. So their job is to water it daily for the first two weeks to make sure it gets established, and then as it starts to grow, to take care of it. So to prune away any damaged leaves to make sure that the vines don't get run over by the lawnmower. That may or may not have happened to us. And to nurture the plant until you start to see fruit. Now it's going to take a long time. Growing a melon over the summer is so fun to do because it literally will take the entirety of the summer to get to the melon part. These plants are 10010020 day plants sometimes. So start as soon as you listen to this episode and then watch that melon grow throughout the summer and then have a big harvest party. Fingers crossed you get there by the end of the summer. So growing melons, super fun, super sweet. And kids love melon. At least I love melon. My kids love melon. And so it really motivates them to be out in the garden because they're a little bit more invested in watermelon than they would be, let's say, in kale. Project number seven is to create a pollinator habitat. So you can do this by pulling together a lot of different nesting materials that are perfect for all kinds of bees and butterflies. So this is a great project to do even with an older child. You could do some research about what types of habitats butterflies and bees and local bees in your area use in order to nest and to, you know, to have habitat in a garden space or in a natural space. I've built habitats with all different kinds of materials. I've done them with little bamboo sticks. We've bought bamboo sticks together with my kids, and then we cut them all up, you know, force them all into little bitty spaces. We have used things like pine cones and other natural materials to kind of group them together to create somewhat of a hiding place, a nesting place for pollinators. So this will be a really fun project to do with a kid that's a little bit older. You can research what kind of habitats the pollinators need, do some research even on how these populations are a little bit endangered, maybe a lot endangered in your area, what's going on with them and why habitats are important, and then take some time together to build that habitat and then observe it. So set up maybe a phone in that place on a day where you're going to be around the house. You could time lapse it and see if you're seeing any bees or butterflies or insects, get near that habitat and start to use it. This is a really fun way to introduce your child to a bigger ecosystem and to help them see how they can make a difference simply by creating a little habitat for the bees and the butterflies. This summer, if your kids are anything like mine, they are going to love this next project, and that is creating a smoothie garden. My kids love smoothies. They particularly love fruit smoothies, so berries and bananas, and they're all into that acai thing too. But I like to put some vegetables in those smoothies as well. And then my teenage girls, they're definitely Getting more into, like, juices and cleanses and, you know, things like that. So a really fun project to do would be to plant up a smoothie or a juice garden and then actually have your kids use it. So in that berry smoothie, you want to make sure you've got lots of fiber and also some greens. So you could show them how to grow kale. How to grow Swiss chard. You could buy celery plants. At this point of the summer, I definitely wouldn't be trying to start celery from seed, but heading to the store to buy celery plants, Swiss chard plants, kale plants. Spinach is going to be a little hard to grow in the middle of the summer, but you could try out some, like, heat friendly spinach types like Malabar spinach or longevity spinach. You can even throw in some sweet potato leaves if you're growing sweet potatoes. But you put those leaves inside that fruity smoothie mix and boom, you've just totally upgraded the smoothie. And your kid gets to get the experience of having something out in the garden that they literally bring in, put into something that they really like drinking, and then turn it into a more nutritious meal. So a smoothie garden or a juice garden. For a juice garden, things you could grow for that would be celery or cilantro, parsley, cucumbers. Let's see. Any kind of greens really can go into a green juice. You could do a bed of carrots for a carrot juice. You could do a bed of beets for beet juice. There's so many opportunities and options for growing a juice or a smoothie garden. So do your research. Maybe test out some juices at the beginning of the summer. You could go to a juice bar, go to like a Whole Foods or something and let your child try a few fresh juices. And then they could choose. Okay, this is my favorite. This is the most delicious one. And then you guys could plan out your juice garden together, grow it, and by the end of the summer, be making your own delicious garden juice and smoothies. The next project that is so fun to do with kids is making a bird bath. Now, in the middle of summer, things are heating up and also drying up. And this is a critical time for a lot of our native and local birds to find water so you can provide for them right in your garden space. One simple way is to literally take the bottom saucers of terracotta pots, turn the terracotta pot upside down, you can glue or just place that terracotta pot saucer right on top of the pot itself and fill it up with water. So your child's job every day could be to head out, find your little bird baths throughout the garden and and clean out the water, make sure the water is clear and clean, and give the birds a way to come and get a drink. All throughout the summer, I did this, and the very first day I did, I set a tripod and my phone up and took a time lapse. And it was incredible to see all the birds coming in from all over, landing in my garden, and taking a drink from the bird bath. So if you want a chance to watch birds and for your kids to get to experience nature more in your space, create. Decorating a bird bath is a magical way to do it. Finally, you could give your kids at least one meal a week where they are in charge of cooking. And the challenge can be that they've got to find things from the garden to turn into dinner. So you could have, if you have multiple kids, then maybe have each of them take one night or each night when it's assigned for kids cooking night, they each get one dish they can prepare and do a little contest, do some taste tests, maybe do some blindfolding and taste everybody's food. And then the judges can decide who did the best job and who maybe needs to take some cooking lessons from mom. This is a great way to connect your kids to the way that food is made and also to give yourself a serious break from the kitchen. And who doesn't need that, especially in the middle of summer when the kids are there for three meals a day. I mean, could they just go find their own food or something? I don't know. Doing this is going to be such a fun experiment. It is going to be a mess, though, so prepare yourself. I like to have a rule at my house that if kids cook, kids clean. So I love to have my kids in the kitchen. I love for them to cook and learn how to make food themselves. But we have a rule that if you take it out and use it, you're also responsible for cleaning it up and putting it back. So feel free to steal that rule from me. But you could inspire your kids to make all kinds of dishes. Let them. Maybe you could buy or check out from the library some recipe books, things that would give them some ideas of how to make food straight from the garden. Find some vegetarian cookbooks or raw food cookbooks. Try to get as creative as possible or help them to get as creative as possible on ways that they can use all different things from the garden and turn them into some really fun dishes. They can make little finger sandwiches. They could do little sushi rolls with the vegetables. They could make herb dips. They could create a bread with things that they picked and pulled from the garden. They could do one of those big butter boards where you smush out all the butter and put herbs and flowers on top. I mean, I, for one, would be pretty much okay with that. They could just roast vegetables so they could, you know, harvest some potatoes, some radishes, and just put some olive oil, salt, and pepper in there and then put them in the oven, pull it out, and boom, you're done. I think that would probably be the. That would probably be the dish that my son would choose. So challenge your kids to cook at least one meal for you a week. And, man, you could turn this into all kinds of things. You could make it a contest. You could even pay them for it, you know, so pay them to be your cook for the night. You could say, you know, I was going to go out to a restaurant, but I thought I would risk my life and let you cook for me instead. So Those are my 10 summer garden projects. Some of these projects are going to be perfect for a toddler, and some of these projects are going to be great for a teen. The name of the game is getting outside with your kids this summer and making the most of every moment that we have. These seasons go faster than we anticipate. This year. My oldest is 17. My youngest is 12. And if you would have told me I would ever say that sentence 10 years ago, I would have not believed you. I thought I would have preschoolers and elementary school kids for my entire life, but turns out I don't know. All those other people who told me my kids were going to grow up, they were actually right. So it is all about making the most of the season. And I have to tell you, my favorite summer of. Of all are the summers where I make a bucket list. And we slowly check things off the list. And oftentimes, my best bucket lists have lots of things connected to the garden with them. So find some ways to make your own bucket list. Hopefully you'll take a few of these 10 summer projects and get out there and make some magical moments and memories with your kids before summer ends. Thanks so much for listening to the gardenary podcast, the Grow youw Self Podcast. We're all about growing ourselves to the next level and making the garden ordinary. If you want to get a calendar for free to know when to plant all the things we talked about today and many more. You can get that for free@gardenary.com calendar and we've got loads of resources waiting for you@gardenary.com just head over there, head to our blog and start reading. We're here to support you all along the way, all summer long and for many seasons to come. So I hope you'll keep listening. Share Share this podcast with one of your friends who's got kids. Challenge them maybe to come over and do these projects with you. Whatever you do, don't let this summer pass by without getting out digging in the dirt and making the most of these moments with your precious children. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.