How to Start a Summer Garden with Your Kids (In 1 hour)

Looking for a way to entertain your kids this summer? Well, I have to say there is no better way than starting a backyard garden. But if you're anything like I was about 10 years ago, the idea of building a garden from scratch with my kids right by my side feels so overwhelming. In this video, I'm going to show you this step by step to set up a beautiful garden right alongside your kids, no matter how old they are, in less than an hour. I've just done this with a few young families in my city so that you can know how you can do it, too. So the first step is you want to pick a location, and you want to pick a spot that is near where the kids play. The idea is we want to include the garden as just part of your everyday activities. So for this family, we put the garden right next to the playground. This is right outside their back door where they head every time they come to play in the backyard. You want to pick a spot that's easily accessible for your kids so they can go out and enjoy it. Even if you're indoors making dinner, getting ready for the next activity, or just having a minute. The whole idea of having a garden for your kids is that the kids can actually get access to the garden. So pick a space that's got as much sun as possible and is as close to the other activities that your kids enjoy in the yard as possible, too. The next thing you want to do is get all your materials beforehand. The key to having this go off successfully in less than an hour is you doing the hard work ahead of time. So you want to get all of your raised bed materials, you want to get any kind of coverage you need for the ground underneath, and you want to get your soil, your plants, your seeds, any tools you're going to need, have all those on hand before you call the kids out to play. The next thing you want to do before the kids show up is prep your space. So for this garden, we place this right alongside the rest of their grass in the backyard. So we came out before the kids came out, and we did some marking, we did some measuring, and we did some weed eating. So in this case, the grass was pretty easy to pull up. And we just use a weed eater. We just weeded all the way down to basically the nubs of the grass, which is just enough to kill it. And then we covered it with Z board. If you haven't seen my video all about using that to suppress weeds, you can watch that right after this video. So we did the hard work before the kids came out, all the stuff that might, you know, make a mess got rid of the grass, lined up the space, and then we were ready for the kids to come. Now, in this case, we're using one of our gardenary cedar bed kits. And these are so perfect for kids. They've got these nice little caps where the kids can sit down and they're four by four. So they're just a perfect little size for a starter garden kit with kids. We went ahead and screwed on the caps before the kids came out, and then they came out and in no time were able to slide the boards in place and get the bed completed. These guys did an amazing job. So we turned the bed over, put it into its spot, and then we showed them how to use the paper. We pre cut the paper and, and went ahead and laid the paper down inside the raised bed. So if you wanna call the kids out to help you assemble the bed, that's up to you. In our case, because we had a kit, it was a perfect time to bring kids out to help. But if you've got some heavy constructing to do, or if you're building this bed yourself, then you might wanna go ahead and do that part before the kids join you. Unless your kids are older, if they're teens or tweens, maybe they would enjoy doing some of that constructing piece. For us, we're working with some younger kids, so it's perfect to just have this kit where they could slide things together easily without any tools. Once the kids are involved, it's time to get dirty. So this is when you want to bring everyone all hands on deck and fill up this garden with soil. It's a great time to talk with your kids about how soil is necessary for plants, how taking care of our soil is such a big part of gardening, and you can start to talk about what soil is made of. This is a time to show off your muscles and really brag on the kids because they're going to be doing some pretty hard work with this soil. You also at this point want to add any climbing structures. So for this garden, we added our gardenary trellis right in the center. You could add make your own little bamboo teepee however you want to do it, but you want to have some kind of climbing structure for the kids. Having something that grows tall in the garden is a must have for a fun kid's summer garden. All right, so now you are basically ready to plant up. You've got the bed in place, you've got the soil there, and You've got your trellis, so it's time to start with plants. Plants should go in the garden first, and you want to really start with plants that the kids are going to be excited about. Flowers, herbs, things they can smell, things they can taste, things they can really see. The bright colors on those are great to engage the kids and get them involved right from the start. Give them some nice shovels that you know aren't dangerous and let them dig in and start planting and don't be too precious about it. Kind of give them the spaces where you want the plants to go and. And then let them lead the way. It's not a big deal if they don't put everything right in the place that you designated it to go. I love doing the border of the garden first with the kids because it's easily accessed by them. They can just dig in and put their herbs and flowers right in place. So easy to do. And it's just a very nice, quick thing, a quick win for the kids. Even if they get bored after that, they've at least contributed and gotten to plant with you. Next thing you want to do is move on to the seeds. And we like to plant the fruit. See, and, you know, they may space them perfectly, they may not. You can always come back and fix it a little bit later. Once they go back indoors, you can spread the seeds out. But these kids were great. They put the seeds in place. We might have to pull a couple up and space them out a little bit, but for the most part, they were amazing. And we were working with kids that are ages 18 months, 3 and 6. So we got the cucumbers planted, then we moved on to very exciting things like corn, watermelon, and pumpkin. I made a whole list of activities that I love doing with kids, by the way. So if you want to grab that, that, it's right below this video. It's some fun little activities like building a little teepee that you can do with your kids right away. Once we get those fun, exciting fruit seeds planted, then it's time to do the finishing touches. So we added some bean seeds. We put some dill right around the cucumbers, and then it was time to label everything. This is a really important part of the process for the kids. It helps them have good memory recall of where all the seeds and plants have gone in the garden. And those little markers are going to remind them every single week when you what's growing in each space. So adding labels, maybe you're like me and you forget to do it in your own garden. Don't neglect it. When you're growing a kid's garden, once you get everything labeled, you can talk through a couple of the responsibilities that the kids are going to have for the garden in the coming weeks, like watering it, like making sure that everything's got enough space, and even start to talk about your first harvest. We ended today's session by scattering earthworm castings all over the garden. We talked about the importance of worms and just the health of the garden overall. And. And then I let them know that they could go ahead and get their first harvest even before dinner tonight. They could pick basil, chives, sage, any of those leafy greens that they're free to pick those first little harvests right away. Now, I set up this garden with this great mom who wanted to teach her kids more about the garden this summer and learn herself as well. I got to share our new Kids Kitchen Garden Camp curriculum with her, which leads kids and moms and dads and anybody else who wants to join in the fun on how to grow a garden from leaves to roots to fruit. So we walked through this book together so she can see how she can use all these activities, all these storybooks, all these snacks and crafts throughout the summer as their garden grows together. And I even showed her some of our fun little printables that will help her do just that. If you want to join our Kids Kitchen Garden Camp, I'll put a link to that right below this video, too. And I've made a video all about my favorite activities to do every single summer with my kids. So go and watch that one right now.