Gardening – getting your kids interested

Entry #59, April 8, 2010

I just spent the last 4 days in Miami visiting my in-laws for the Easter holiday.  What I love about visiting

Yummy, our vegetable garden is going to look like this!

grandparents, is they always have cool ‘projects’ for the kids to do.  This weekend they had my sons germinating vegetable seeds with coffee filters and plastic baggies.

I told you that I’m super stoked about starting a garden this year at our new house. When I saw them doing this project, I knew I was running to buy seeds the moment we got back to Jacksonville.  A few weeks ago Petit Elefant had a great step-by-step guide on how to start seeds.

My kids enjoyed finding the gardening spot in the backyard, and figuring out what seeds to buy. So these are what we decided on:

Herbs: Rosemary, Basil, Chives, and Sage

Vegetables: Lettuce, Green Beans, Peppers and Carrots

4 herbs, and 4 veggies should get us started nicely

I decided to do some research to see who else has heard of this germinating thing!  I found the Garden Web forum has an ongoing discussion as to what seeds germinate will with coffee filters, why others believe paper towels work better.

There’s also some debate as to whether the plastic bags are really necessary, and some parents in the forum agreed that it’s more for the ‘process’ when you’re doing it with kids.

Spray the coffee filters with a spray bottle? Oh! THAT would have been a little less messy than our 'wet paper towel' method!

Here are the steps we did:

1.) Cut small coffee filters in half, and tape at one end to form a cone.

2.) Place 4-10 seeds per coffee filter, dampen with wet paper towel.  On the forum they used a water bottle – good idea.  Then my daughter would not have had quite as much fun as she did! (See photo to the right)

3.) Take sandwich lockable bags and with a permanent marker, write what’s contained in each.

Labeled each bag... let the germination commence!

4.) After each bag is complete, put in a warm place.  I didn’t know if they needed sun or not.  I put ours in a closet – supposedly within days we will see germination! We’ll see.

I’m hoping that ours looks as great as At Home at Home. (see photo below)

What beautiful veggies!

Tips: Take kids with you to the store to buy seeds, soil, watering can, etc.. My daughter (4) was thrilled to be able to choose the seed packets, pick out her own gloves, it was like Christmas!