Get the garden ready for spring with assistance from the kids! Celebrate the start of the season while sprucing up your outdoor space with these entertaining and engaging child-friendly activities.
DIY Garden Decorations
Crafts are simultaneously engaging and relaxing, so making DIY garden decorations is a great way to keep the children calm and entertained for hours!
Upcycle old pallets and containers and even disused tyres to create characterful boxes for your plants. Vintage milk floats and ceramic cooking pots are particularly decorative and have an ideal depth for herbs while pallets and tyres are best suited to fruit and veg, bulbs, and bedding plants.
Feeling whimsical? Create little wooden signs that guide guests around your garden and mark each section. Older children could use stencils and craft knives to carve out words and shapes while younger children should stick to pens and paints.
Design a Scavenger Hunt
Encourage your children to explore your outdoor space from lawn to leaves with a garden-themed scavenger hunt. This will help to inspire an appreciation of nature and perhaps a passion for gardening!
Make a list of things you’d usually find in the garden and connect these to clues that will help the participants locate them. Write out these clues in a random order and place them carefully around the garden, leaving one clue spare as the starting point.
Keep it educational by including short facts about garden creatures or centre the scavenger hunt around a seasonal theme like Easter.
Plant a Themed Bed
Encourage green fingers in your children by planting a themed bed together. This is a great opportunity to bond and show your kids the mental and physical benefits of gardening while introducing colour to your outdoor space.
Combine fun and function by creating a pizza garden with key produce like tomato plants and herbs commonly used on pizza toppings. Once everything has grown, you can use your fresh ingredients to make pizzas from scratch!
Other ideas include a rainbow garden with strategically placed flowers in many different colours and a butterfly garden that’s filled with nectar-rich and heavily perfumed plants.
Garden Art Projects
Add visual interest to your outdoor space by experimenting with garden art projects. You can showcase your personality and encourage the children to express their creativity while simultaneously elevating your garden design.
Paint a vibrant mural on your garden fence – using paint suitable for outdoor use! – or create a pattern along the pathways using pebbles and flagstones or mosaic stepping stones. In the summer you can set up an arts and crafts corner where you and the kids can create beautiful garden scenes.