Does your whole family enjoy produce from the garden but you’re the one doing all the work? Kids gardening activities keep them involved in the whole process from seed planting to harvest and all the maintenance activities in between.

Gardening together improves your family’s diet and contributes to food sustainability. Children learn where their food comes from and the value of their work in a hands-on way. Here are a few tried and true gardening activities for kids that I’ve used in my own family.

Keys to the Best Gardening Activities for Kids

I’m mostly a vegetable gardener, and I grow food to feed my family. While I’m always looking for ways to get my kids in the garden, they often simply aren’t interested in gardening.

The keys to good garden memories are to keep it fun and get the kids invested in a small plot they are responsible for.

To begin with, involve your kids in planning your garden. What are their favorite vegetables or flowers? When your family has a say in what you are growing, they are more likely to eat the harvest, too.

Plan Your Garden

Have each member of the family decide on a few things they would like to grow and eat or enjoy. Sit down as a family and discuss what plants would be best in the space you have.

We love scrolling through seed catalogs and websites. There are so many varieties of common vegetables. Let your kids try a few heirloom plants that look interesting or different than the norm – black tomatoes, anyone?

Prepare Your Vegetable Beds with Kids

While hard labor in the garden isn’t the “fun” part of gardening, it’s necessary for everyone to pitch in. I often repeat the mantra – many hands make light work.

Older children like putting together a gardening playlist. Use an outdoor speaker and enjoy some tunes with your fresh air.

From digging out garden beds to hauling compost, there are jobs for every kid to pitch in. If your garden is already established, focus on jobs like tilling and fertilizing the soil.

Gardening Projects for Kids

In my experience, the only way to get my kids cheerfully helping me in the garden is to make the process fun. If I stress out while I’m weeding and give my kids a hard time if they accidentally pull a useful plant instead of a weed, they run far away.

Getting them back to the garden is then really hard. Truly, how big of a deal is it if they accidentally pull a baby carrot or a radish? I do it myself. No yelling in the garden. The plants don’t like it.

Beds for Everyone

I like to give my kids their own garden bed or section of the beds if possible. They take responsibility for the planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting of their little plot.

Once their plants are growing, my kids make little competitions between themselves, too. Who grew the biggest pumpkin or who got tomatoes harvested first. Offer a prize for the person whose garden produces the most food by the end of the growing season.

Don’t Use Chemicals

One caveat to gardening activities for kids – you probably know this already, but chemicals shouldn’t be handled by your kids. In my opinion, they don’t belong in your garden at all, but at the very least, don’t let your kids apply them. If you use chemicals, I don’t think you can ask your kids to help at all.

Instead try organic pest control or companion plants to help mitigate common garden issues without resorting to chemicals.

Plant a Rainbow Garden

Do your kids love colors? Choose flowers or vegetables of different colors and plant them in a ROYGBIV rainbow pattern. This is also a great gardening activity for learning about edible flowers.

Herb Garden Pots

I keep some of my herbs in flower pots and containers rather than planting them in beds. The kids love painting and labeling those containers every year. They take pride in keeping “their” herbs alive all season long.

We’re Going on a Bug Hunt . . .

Another fun activity for younger kids especially is a bug hunt. We like to pattern a rhyme after the book Going on a Bear Hunt. I teach the kids to not be scared of bugs and to find good insects and pests.

Kids are great pest hunters. Give them a small jar and give them $1 for filling it with squash beetles.

Butterfly Garden

I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who doesn’t like butterflies. They are amazing creatures! Choose plants to attract butterflies and other pollinators. Depending on where you live, butterflies might even choose your garden to lay their eggs.

Don’t forget to provide a butterfly puddle! Keeping a shallow container filled with moist soil or sand is a great gardening activity and responsibility for a kid. Place rocks or stones in the container for butterflies to perch while drinking.

Garden Journal

Some kids will really get into documenting the gardening process. Linear thinkers will like garden journals with graph lines and artsy kids will appreciate a sketch book and watercolors.

Once they plant vegetables in their beds, show them how to document weekly progress and growth. Vegetables grow quickly this time of year so make sure they date each entry.

Pizza Garden

Do you have picky eaters in your house? Let them plant a themed garden for their favorite foods. For example, if a kid loves pizza, they can plant basil, oregano, onions, tomatoes and garlic.

Other garden themes could include green salads, teas, salsa, or Greek.

Worm Composting

Some kids might not get that excited about the growing process but will get excited about decomposition. If you don’t already have a compost pile, this is a great time to start one!

Get composting worms to help your pile and teach kids all about soil nutrients, decomposition, and how it helps your garden grow again.

Sunflower House

When my kids were younger, we made a sunflower house by planting sunflowers in a circle. It creates a natural shelter that is shady when they need a hiding spot. Hanging out in the sunflower house is a fun garden outdoor activity when they need a break.

Rain Gauge

My kids also love to track our rainfall with a rain gauge and see how this affects growth in the garden. Document it in their garden journals or just write the amount on a wall calendar. Bonus – they also get to practice math with fractions and decimals.

Moonlight Garden

Are your kids night owls? A moonlight garden is so fun. Plant mostly white flowers or plants with silver, shimmery leaves. They will reflect the moonlight in the dark. It’s beautiful and so peaceful. My older kids love this.

Seed Saving

All through the summer, I teach my kids how to save seeds from their very best plants, so they can use them again the following spring. It’s a great way to reiterate the life cycle of plants and also help them save money in the garden. My kids get a real sense of pride when they plant seeds they saved year after year.

Getting Kids to Weed

You’ll notice I didn’t include weeding in the list of “fun gardening activities for kids”. 😉 We can try to make gardening as engaging and fun as possible, but some tasks are just kind of tedious. There’s a life lesson in this for kids, too.

Weeding is quite often back-breaking work and no fun at all, but it is possible to get your kids to weed without fights.

Teach Kids Difference Between Weeds and Plants

First of all, I try to teach my kids how to weed as they go so it doesn’t get so overwhelming and overgrown. If each kid has a little section of the garden they are responsible for, it is more manageable.

Weeding Competitions for Kids

Sometimes, though, I need them to help me weed the whole big garden. In this case, I usually set limits on what they have to do and also use their competitive spirits.

The first step to getting your kids to weed the garden is to teach them how to tell a weed from a vegetable. Early on, I discovered my kids just weren’t confident in picking out the weeds. Once they have the necessary knowledge, it’s much easier to get them to help me.

Time limits work sometimes. I tell them we are all going to go weed for 10 minutes and then enjoy a glass of lemonade in the shade.

Just like with bugs, I turn weeding into a competition. Give each kid a bucket or container and tell them to fill it with weeds. When the bucket is full, they are done. First one done gets a prize.

My kids like to measure their success by filling their buckets. It also encourages them to keep at it instead of quitting before they are done.

Gardening Equipment for Kids

Proper equipment and gardening gloves also help! Weeding can be back breaking work, so having kneeling pads and the right tools definitely make the job easier.

Although I prefer simple, traditional gardening equipment, I recently tried the Weed Zinger with my kids.

Using the Weed Zinger is pretty easy. Just wait for a nice rain so the ground is soft, insert the stand-up weeder in the middle of the plant you wish to remove, give it a good twist, and pull. Then, have fun launching the plant as far as you can. That’s my son, Ben, (in my garden boots!) demonstrating the Weed Zinger.

When All Else Fails – Bribery

As long as we’re being perfectly honest, and I endeavor to be honest with you in my blogging, bribery is an awesome parenting tool. I might have been one of those parents who said they’d never have to resort to bribery with my own kids, but well, then life happened.

I totally bribe my kids and I’ll be the first to admit it. 😀 After we weed the garden, we can get an ice cream or a make homemade lemonade or go to the pool. I don’t have a problem with that at all.

Benefits for Kids Gardening

Use your garden as a learning opportunity for your children. When kids help in the garden, they learn how food grows, master new skills, and explore earth science up close and personal. The garden is a great place to see insects and other wildlife.

When something goes wrong in the garden like an attack on an insect or disease that harms your plants, kids get gentle lessons on the cycle of life. The compost bin is the perfect way to teach your kids about decomposition.

Other Gardening Posts You’ll Love

• 25 Secrets to Vegetable Gardening
• 20 Cute & Easy DIY Garden Plant Markers To Make
• How to Trellis and Grow Zucchini in a Pot (Space Saving Garden Tips)

Do you have other ideas for getting your kids outdoors and working in the garden? Share them below!