How to Grow a Foolproof First Garden With Your Kids

There are tons of things that kids can love about gardening: digging, picking, identifying color and texture and taste. If you’ve got a small spot of the yard to dedicate to the endeavor, why not create a garden for your kids? You can keep it very simple, using “cut and come again” vegetables and flowers, and vegetables that are prolific and unfussy. You can find all these seeds and plants at your local nursery.

The plants you'll need

Here's what I recommend for your children's garden:

• Cherry tomato start

• Sunflower seeds or starts

• Lettuce seeds

• Radish seeds

• Beet seeds

• 1 six pack of green beans

• 1 six pack of carrot starts

• 1 pumpkin start

• 1 cucumber start

Cherry tomatoes are almost guaranteed success, with prolific and enduring harvests. If you went with a full-sized tomato, there’s too much chance of prematurely picking a tomato before it’s done, or a mood being ruined when that tomato is hit by blossom end rot or worms. If you choose a mid-height sunflower, you’ll be able to cut them and have them grow side shoots over the season, or you can simply leave them to bloom and bring the bees. As long as you water religiously, the seeds of lettuce, radishes and beets should germinate easily. Pulling the radishes and beets out can be extremely satisfying for young kids, and you can pick leaves off the lettuce and it will grow back. 

I suggest carrot starts instead of seeds because carrots are notoriously hard to germinate and long to come to size. Cucumbers will round out the possible salads from the bed, and a pumpkin will be the pièce de résistance at the end of the season when the rest of the garden is spent. You can save the pumpkin seeds from this year’s jack o’lantern for next year’s garden. 

Laying out the garden

In laying out the garden, you want to use the seeds to separate the tomatoes on one side from the pumpkins on the other. Here's my suggested layout. Starting on one side, plant the tomato plant. Remember that tomatoes need support, so use a tomato cage or another trellis and add it early. They’re hard to put on later. Now plant rows of lettuce, radish, beets and carrots and beans across the bed. Make sure the beans are last. At the other end, place the pumpkin at the top of the bed and the cucumber below it. Plant a few sunflowers (no more than two or three) in the corners of the bed. In between the beans and cucumber, place a trellis so the beans and cucumber can climb. 

Maintaining your garden

You'll need to water the bed once a day, first thing in the morning. You want to water so you can feel moist soil when you stick your finger about six inches into the bed. Within a few weeks the sunflowers and other seeds should germinate, and a month after planting, it’ll be time to thin the radishes, beets and lettuce to one healthy seedling every six inches. 

The crops will all be ready for harvest at different times, but each of these crops offers an opportunity to pick, grab and dig, with lots of different textures and colors. You should be able to make a few salads from the crops, and even have green beans with a number of meals. Everything in this bed can be eaten without cooking, so you can snack in the garden.