Children enjoy watching seeds grow. If it isn’t warm enough to plant outdoors yet, plant seeds indoors in trays for transplanting later. Homegrown plants usually perform as well as or better than greenhouse plants.
So what shall we plant? Some easy flowers to plant from seed are sunflowers, cosmos, zinnias, and marigolds to name a few. Or perhaps you might prefer to grow vegetables like beans, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers and melons. If you like to watch butterflies, plant some parsley with your flowers and watch for caterpillars that can grow into Swallowtail butterflies.
Do you have space in your yard for a vegetable garden? If so, you can plant rows of vegetables and some flowers too. If you don’t have much room, perhaps you could plan a container garden, or settle for a nice flower bed. Be sure to include a space or planter that is your child’s own space.
Containers for vegetables need to be quite large – a minimum of a cubic foot of growing soil for most vegetables.
Important to know: Are there honeybees or wild bees in your area? That may seem a strange question, but if you don’t have them your fruits and vegetables may not develop. You could do their job by using a Qtip to transfer pollen from one flower to another in a small garden, but it is very time consuming. One way to tell if there are bees around is to watch the dandelions and clover blossoms to see what comes to them.
Vegetables that need the bees are squash, beans, melons, pumpkins, okra, and most anything that has seeds in the edible part of the vegetable. If you plant these crops, protect the bees by paying attention to the directions on any pesticides you use for bugs. Seven dust should NEVER be used on a plant that is blooming or it will kill off the pollinators (bees) you need to make your vegetables ripen.
Vegetables that will grow with or without the bees are cabbage, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, turnips, beets, and other root crops. Corn is wind pollinated and needs to be planted in large patches for good pollination, so isn’t well suited to small gardens.
For more information about bees go to …of Bees, Beekeepers, and Food
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