Gardening with Kids

I don’t know about your kids, but if I’m doing something or trying to do something, the kids HAVE to be with me or they are going to DIE if they aren’t with me. Sometimes it can be so frustrating. Why? Because I know I could get things done so much faster if I just had a few minutes alone to do it. Starting my garden was no exception this year. The kids just HAD to be with me every step of the way.

Every year I try to start a garden. Every year my plants grow but never produce anything and then die. This year was a little more challenging because the kids were home with me when I needed to start my garden. At into that pregnancy exhaustion and I thought my garden was a goner for sure this year!

We (I say we, because remember, the kids had to help me) started with our front semi-raised garden because it really just needed to be weeded. So we set to weeding the garden. After we got that garden mostly cleaned out, we moved to my new garden project. We have a side yard that is fenced off from our back and front yard. It isn’t very big and I’ve always tried to figure out what I could possibly do with this small area. When there was just 1 kiddo who was small, it was a nice place for us to play and it was easy to keep her contained. Our backyard wraps around the house so there she had more room to run and get into trouble! With 3 kids, no way. They practically kill each other in our house and the rooms are larger than the small fenced side yard. Plus someone would open the wooden gate and go in the front yard and then the others would follow..it would just be a mess. So, over the years I have continued to contemplate what to do with that small yard. This year it hit me! It is PERFECT for a garden. I blame COVID. If we weren’t home and if we weren’t having trouble getting some food, I never would have felt the need to have more of our own food. Not that my gardens have ever produced before so I’m not sure what my mind was really thinking!

Anyway, that little area was heck to get cleaned out. At one time there had been a tree there, but because it kept rubbing our roof and our neighbors roof, we had it cut down. My husband was also convinced that it was a tree that produced poisonous berries so out of concern for our beautiful children and dog, he decided it was in our best interest to have it cut down. Said tree with berries that dropped all the time has left us with several trees that keep trying to pop up. I had to get the trimmers and cut those bad boys down. Some were small enough that I could pull them up by the roots. My oldest son wanted to use the clippers as well. With close supervision (Mama helping him hold them and clip) he clipped some of the branches. What a big helper! My daughter helped pull weeds as did my little red. I will say that having them help out was a great way to wear them out and get them excited about the garden.

Now both of our gardens were mostly cleaned out. I say mostly because, y’all, I’m not about perfection. We don’t have a tiller (yes I know you can rent one), but as I’ve said before, I’ve NEVER had my garden produce ANYTHING at this house except for weeds. At our old house I could get my garden to produce just about anything I planted. I would get MASSIVE zucchini, cantaloupe, onions, squash, watermelon, lettuce…but NOTHING here. So after we got our gardens mostly cleaned out we took to Amazon to buy some seeds. I did go to Burpee but a lot of the seeds I wanted were out of stock. Apparently everyone had COVID brain and wanted to plant a garden! We ordered some watermelon, lettuce, cantaloupe, cucumber and bell pepper seeds. My daughter and I donned our masks and took to a local home improvement store and nursery and purchased some other bell pepper plants, tomatoes, kale, strawberries, squash, and zucchini. We also got an orange tree. My daughter REALLY wanted a cherry tree, but they didn’t have those. I really wanted an avocado tree, but I didn’t get one. We also purchased a blueberry bush. We purchased flowers too for our new flower beds (more on that at a later time).

When we got home we got to work. The boys woke up from their nap and we set to planting everything. I taught the kids how to dig spots for the plants and seeds. We also put a few seeds in a Ziploc bag with a wet paper towel and placed them in a window so we could watch the plants start to grow (hopefully). After everything was planted, we watered the new plants a little. We didn’t do much watering because we were supposedly going to get rain. We didn’t get any rain so we had to water the next day.

We planted the garden in March. In May our zucchini plant in our side garden looked GREAT and had a ton of little zucchini buds on it! I was so excited! My grape vine that I purchased last year also started to come back! I just knew it was dead because I totally forgot about it last year. Our tomato plant was taking off and so were our bell pepper plants! Our watermelon plants were starting to sprout! Then we started getting rain…lots of rain…great, right? You don’t have to water. Unfortunately it was too much for my zucchini and squash plant in the side garden and they started to rot at the base. All of the zucchini buds started rotting. I was so frustrated. Our garden out front was hanging in there though.

According to several things I found on the Internet, cinnamon would work wonders to help with the rot on my plants. Eggshells were supposedly good for my tomato plants, and sometimes you need to add magnesium to the soil. I also found out that coffee grounds can be good for keeping bugs away from plants and can make them more healthy. I have plenty of coffee grounds! This Mama can’t live without coffee! Speaking of coffee…below are some affiliate links to Amazon for different coffee products! If you click on the link and make a purchase I may earn a commission at not additional cost to you. So I tried all of the above for both of my gardens. The magnesium came in the form of Epsom salt and we were going through a ton of eggs so eggshells were easy to come by! I have a big container of cinnamon (think big bulk store size container) so I was set. Y’all the cinnamon WORKED! I sprinkled it on the base of my zucchini plant. I now have 4 zucchinis growing and they aren’t rotting! The base of my zucchini looks much healthier! My tomato plant in the side yard is HUGE and is producing so many tomatoes. My 2 in the front bed are producing as well and look much healthier after adding the eggshells to the soil. I only put the Epsom salt on my garden in the side yard. We planted some of our strawberry plants in pots and put the coffee grounds in those. I haven’t had any problem with pests and they have been producing nicely.

I always forget to take pictures, but I did take pictures yesterday of my messy gardens! I started out so good. We were going out every other day to weed our gardens (and sometimes instead of weeds plants got pulled…killing this Mama, but that’s how the kiddos learn). We started getting rain again and I didn’t take the kids out to weed as often as we should. Now since a lot of things are growing and producing I’m kind of terrified to pull any weeds out. The weeds seem to have a large root system. You can start pulling at one end of the garden and the root system is halfway down the other end of the garden. I have disturbed many a plant by trying to weed. So now I just try to thin out the weeds a bit.

We check our garden every day. The kids always eat the strawberries before I can get a picture. We did get a tomato the other day and I used it in one of our dinners. We also got one of our black cherry tomatoes. It was pretty good. Last night I was finally able to pick 1 of our orange bell peppers! And we have had a cucumber! We had 1 blueberry but our poor blueberry plant is struggling to make it because our tomato plant and zucchini plant are so big. I didn’t buy any tomato cages because I’ve never had luck with my gardens, but apparently I should have this year. Our watermelon plants are starting to get flowers on them and are taking over the side of the garden they are on! Here’s hoping we get lots of watermelon!

By the way, the seeds in the Ziploc bags did grow! It was a great learning addition to our learning of the parts of a plant. Instead of just coloring the parts of a plant, they got to actually SEE them and watch them grow! I say if your kids want to help with your garden, let them. Or you could make them their own garden to tend to, especially if they are older. They get so excited when they get to eat the fruits and vegetables we grew! It’s not perfect, but it’s our perfect messy garden!