This week Unplug Your Kids' weekly Unplugged Project is Gardens. Not specifically gardening but some sort of aspect about a garden so I thought that I would share a fantastic public children's garden that we visited last month. It was completely visible that it was all about making gardening fun for little hands! To start with all of the beds were surrounded with funky colored stones. Hmmm, remember that previous unplugged project we did about painted rocks? Well this would definitely be a fantastic way to make use of the buckets full of funky frogs, ladybugs and other rock creatures we have piling up in our craft corner :)
Another fun garden craft they incorporated was using old rubber boots potted with flowers as row markers. There were tons of mismatched rubber boots at the end of each row and they were embellished with more funky paintings! I'm sure that we have a couple of old pairs of holey boots kicking around in the shoe cupboard that we're going to have to dig out and plant flowers in *grin*
Don't have any old boots at home to try this with? How about looking at the thrift stores. You should be able to find a slew of multi colored boots there and most of the time they only cost a buck or two :)
Under an arbor we found a neat poster of the life of a radish under glass and there was another one on the life of a sunflower to. Wouldn't you just love to have growth charts of flowers and vegetables tucked away in your garden for your children to study and compare the stages with what you are growing in your garden? I know books do the same thing but there's something extra special about them :)
In another corner of the garden they had a GIANT teepee set up for growing beans on. It must have been at least 8 feet tall, made out of old tree limbs and driftwood sticks all wrapped with twine so that the bean runners will have something to climb to create a solid wall and they had left an opening on one side so that later on the children will be able to go inside of it :) We've done this on a much smaller scale so this is on my mental list for next years garden plans!
And lastly they had an absolutely fabulous way to make paths between the rows in the garden..... PINECONES!! Now I would have never thought of collecting pinecones to use as mulch between our vegetable rows. My kids just love collecting pinecones and we have lots of them around here so you can guess what we'll be doing this fall *grin* I wouldn't think that they would break down really quickly either so they should last and last. Hope you enjoyed our trip to the children's garden :)
The boots are too cute. Love the colors.... My oldest has confiscated some worn out western boots from our baby boy for the same purpose. But they're not nearly so colorful.
This is such a wonderful post! All the ideas you present are so easily adaptable to home gardens (except maybe the life cycle poster under glass, but as you point out, there are books).
I love the boot idea, and the pine cone path. We have tons of pine cones here but they are the very large, prickly, Ponderosa variety, but I still might be able to do it. Thanks for the ideas! I really enjoyed your post, and your blog is so pretty. It is truly a pleasure to visit!
Once we get a spot (which means re-fencing the yard), I want to have a garden for the kids and let them pick out plants & all that. And I think it may have to have some of those cute rain boots!
