Creating a Children’s Garden

Creating a Children’s Garden

There’s no doubt we’ve all done it.  You pinned an image on Pinterest and thought to yourself,

“Self – you are going to do that awesome craft/activity/recipe/diet/homeschooling-thing this week! That is just too cool to forget about. We just can’t live another day without doing that!”

And then, lo and behold, the week ends, a new week begins, and that lovely little Pinterest image moves further and further down your feed and eventually, that little project joins up with the zillions of other pinned images that you never get to.

Well friends, if this is you, you are not alone.  In fact, if this is you, then you are in the right place and you’re reading the blog of a chronic “pinner-but-never-doer.”

So, now you ask, what does this have to do with the title of this post – Creating a Children’s Garden?  Well, you see, we’ve pinned every manner of image related to children’s gardens.  We’ve had the best intentions for creating one – a lovely little place for children to play in the dirt and pick flowers without mom’s watchful eye and gentle reminder to not touch and pick things.  And you see, folks, after all this time, we finally did it.  We created a sweet little space for the kids (and apparently the chickens) to play and dig and pick to their heart’s content.

We started by placing some edging stones in a semicircle to mark an area to make the garden.  We picked up a load of compost and dumped a bunch of it in the semicircle.  Then we placed some steppingstones in the garden that would allow the kids to walk around without trampling on TOO much stuff (but then again, it IS their garden and if they want to trample, we’re just going to have to be ok with that).

Then we went to Home Depot and picked up a couple of flats of cheap bedding flowers (some petunias in this case).  We showed the kids how to plant them and let them go at it.  Again, we turned off the “perfectionist” radar and let them do it their own way.  We also added some sunflower and squash seedlings that we had left over from the spring garden.

We added in a “teepee” to grow yard long beans on during the hot, hot Arizona summer.

Finally, we painted a portion of the fence in a rainbow pattern to add a little interest and fun to the area.

In the future, we hope to:

  1.  Add an outdoor chalkboard by painting a large board with chalkboard paint and leaning it up against the block wall fence.
  2. Add a “pounding” table – Perhaps a small wooden table that the kids can bang nails into with a small hammer.
  3. Large river rocks that we paint and decorate with the letters of the alphabet – http://pinterest.com/pin/232850243203377598/.  (We also think that these strawberry rocks – http://pinterest.com/pin/232850243206547884/ are absolutely ADORABLE.)

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