Designing a Kids' Garden

When it comes to making a kids-only garden, half the fun is in the designing. Here's where your backyard reflects your family's own style, your garden's conditions, and your region's climate. There are plenty of resources to advise you on the last two, but you're the expert when it comes to creating a garden that matches your family's personalities.

Getting Started

Start simple and small. One easy design is to divide one-foot-squares with paths, adding as many as you'd like in whatever pattern suits your spot. The paths can be made of stones, bark mulch, newspaper covered with straw, or even boards. Kids plant something different in each square. The design is tidy and manageable. Circular gardens are fun, too. Slice them, pie-fashion, with the paths meeting in the middle. Kids can create a teepee out of branches to use as focal point for the center of the circle garden.

Sketch it out. Kids may have an easier time creating the look of their garden by drawing it rather than talking about it. Whether or not they take this step, it's helpful for you to sketch the garden on graph paper with one square equaling one foot. This will guide you in laying out the garden on the site. Add paths and draw any structures your kids are dreaming of.

Sunflowers are always a hit.



Grow a rainbow of potatoes!

Landscape Considerations

• Place the garden/play area where you can see it from your kitchen window or other rooms you spend a lot of time in.
• Look up and down. Before you dig, be aware of any power lines, pipes, septic systems, or other existing limitations.
• Create your space. A fence or wall adds privacy and sets boundaries for kids and gear.
• Choose your materials wisely. They should resist rust, rot, and roughhousing. Path surfaces should be comfortable and safe for bare feet but not too slippery when wet.
• Create a garden place for family gatherings. No space? At least make room for kids' outdoor lunches. You don't have to build a deck; a simple fire pit for roasting marshmallows in a country yard or a canopy in a corner of an urban lot will do.

Plants That Make Lasting Impressions

Kids like extremes. Huge flowers, like the classic sunflower, and small vegetables, like cherry or tiny grapelike tomatoes, are tried-and-true favorites. If you have room, try 'Atlantic Giant' pumpkins; if you don't, try bush cucumbers and pick them at cornichon-size for tiny pickles.

Try plants that come in surprising colors and textures. Purple carrots, striped beets, rainbow chard, and white 'Easter egg' radishes are tantalizing. Some kids even go for the blue potatoes. Textured plants are irresistible. If your conditions are right for them, include the fuzzy woolly thyme and lambs' ears, the prickly coneflower and strawflowers, and the delicate maidenhair fern and columbine.

Fragrant plants transport the imagination. If you grow them now, your child will always remember the scents of heliotrope, mignonette, roses, peonies, and lilacs. If you show them which plants to rub between their fingers, they'll never forget lavender, pineapple mint, lemon balm, rosemary, basil, and scented geraniums.

Night bloomers fill summer evenings with magic. Children will never forget heading out at night with flashlights and watching the sphinx moths zooming among the nicotiana and moonflowers. Four o'clock strikes, and evening primroses open, as their name promises.

Positively pickable plants get the thumbs up. While mom's landscape may be off-limits for bouquet gathering, children should have free reign over certain cutting gardens. Cosmos, snapdragon, salvia, zinnia, coleus, and celosia are just a few that produce more vigorously if picked.

Courtesy the National Gardening Association's Kids Gardening Web site.