How do I Plant Flower Seeds with Children?
- 1). Provide children with good quality, child-sized gardening tools, or allow older children to use your tools. Avoid cheap plastic tools, which will bend and break easily. Remind children to wear gloves to protect their hands from blisters and slivers.
- 2). Give children their own garden plots where their flowers will thrive. Select a spot in bright sunlight and be sure the soil drains well. A yardstick-sized flower garden is adequate for young children. Let children help you work the top eight inches of the soil with a hoe or garden fork. Explain to children that flowers require good soil, water and sunlight.
- 3). Fill a pot with commercial potting soil for children to plant seeds in if you are creating a container flower garden. Be sure the container has a drainage hole in the bottom so the plants won't rot.
- 4). Choose flower seeds carefully. Look at gardening books for ideas. Sunflowers are a good choice for young gardeners, as the seeds will sprout in a week and will be 2-feet tall in a month. Nasturtiums are easy to grow and will do well in poor, dry soil. Sunflowers and nasturtiums seeds are large and easy for small fingers to handle.
- 5). Allow children to plant seeds themselves so the flower garden will be truly theirs. Show them how to read the flower seed instructions for planting depths. Don't worry if the flowers are crowded, as you can thin them later in private. Help your child put a labeled Popsicle stick in the ground to mark where seeds are planted.
- 6). Remind the children that the flowers need to be watered regularly. Show them how to touch the top inch of the soil to gauge soil moistness, and instruct them to water when the top of the soil is dry. Explain that the soil shouldn't be too wet, or the roots of the flowers may rot. Tell children that flowers grown in containers need to be checked daily, as the soil dries out quickly, especially during hot weather.
- 7). Show children how to deadhead flowers, or pick off the wilted blooms. Explain that seeds develop in the wilted blooms, and that once seeds begin to develop, the plant won't continue to bloom. Leave a few blooms on the plant for children to gather seeds from for next year's garden. Wait until the blooms are completely wilted and dry, then put the entire bloom in a paper bag until the seeds are dry and hard.
