I love the sense of awe that gardening with my kids gives them. They just love watching new life spring from a seed (and let’s be honest, they also LOVE to get muddy). This is our favorite time of year. It must be many of yours too as we had a bunch of gardening activities linked up last week (and over the year) to our weekly Kid’s Meme, It’s Playtime. Thanks to all who contributed:
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Create a compost bin with We made That. She taught her kids how to be responsible with their waste.
You can recycle DIY watering cans, just like Childhood List.
Share garden fruit together – I love the Garden that At Home with Ali showcased
Have fun creating gardening labels – these are adorable labels created by Dilly Dally Art.
Enjoy a post-gardening snack of garden cupcakes, along with Anna of The Imagination Tree.
Grow edible art and create an egg carton cress caterpillar – inspired by Science Sparks.
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Looking for something simple and easy to grow? Try peas. Thanks Educators Spin on it!
Use toilet paper tubes to create planters, from Kitchen Counter Chronicles.
Use an Egg carton as DIY seed pods to start your plants. Perfect size for a window sill.
Experiment with sunlight and watch the plants follow the sun as you rotate them – thanks Mama Smiles.
Want to recycle those Easter Eggs? Use the shells as a nutrient-rich seed starter. Great tips from Babylandia (be sure to translate the page).
Love this Kids garden table – give your children space to create and observe with At Home with Ali.
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What a great way to start seeds. Housing a Forest had a great idea to a plant their seeds in a sponge. It contains the sprouts, is soil/mess free and it is able to be planted as a unit. Brilliant.
Have limit space? Looking for a contained garden? Why don’t you make a herb garden inside mason jars? That is what Weeping Cherries did with her kids.
Another great Eco-friendly gardening pod to start your plants are the rinds from fruit. My Romana Apartment used grapefruit peels as plant containers.
Toad Haven had fun learning about plant growth and Eco-systems by creating terrariums from water bottles.
We are looking forward to starting our spring garden – TipNut has a great list of things that you can both grow start indoors to give your garden a headstart or to have a smaller garden indoors.
The kids will love to watch their plants grow in sock heads – Happy Whimsical Hearts had a blast making these faces.
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Looking for more reading?? Here is a tutorial on how to create a mini-greenhouse out of a CD case… and a good garden has lots of worms! NurtureStore shares how she created a wormery with her daughter.
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Thanks to everyone who has participated in It’s Playtime over the past year!!! As always, links back tell us you love us 
Only kid-friendly posts accepted and by linking up you are giving us permission to grab a photo if we feature you.
About Rachel
What an amazing list, I am looking forward to having a look at all of them. Thanks for including us.
What a fantastic collection of ideas! Thrilled to see our little science experiment included
How inspiring!!! I can’t wait to visit all these wonderful sites! Thank you so much for including our pea post. I strongly believe in the educational power of gardening with children. After I looked at our site, I realised that there we have 32 posts tagged kids in the garden =) http://theeducatorsspinonit.blogspot.com/search/label/Kids%20in%20the%20Garden We’ve also started a year long garden linky for anyone gardening with kids! Feel free to link up or send us any gardening questions you may have! http://theeducatorsspinonit.blogspot.com/p/gardening.html
Happy gardening!!!!
I love the gardening ideas. Inspiration to get out this holiday.
Fabulous post… I love all the garden inspiration – it is just getting cool enough here (Cape Town) to think about getting back into the garden. Mr Linky would not accept my link and says it already exists… but no!!! Anyway here is our link for the week: Se7en Make Palm Leaf Crosses: http://www.se7en.org.za/2012/04/05/sunday-snippet-se7en-make-palm-sunday-palm-leaf-crosses
Wow, all these ideas are so great. I know I will be trying many of them with my daughter. And thanks for showing off our Compost bin!
I amazed to look that’s. Thrilled to see our little science experiment included.
WoOkRWUd ha ha ha
Heya superb website! Does running a blog similar to this require a
large amount of work? I have very little
knowledge of coding however I had been hoping to start my own blog soon.
Anyhow, if you have any ideas or tips for new blog owners please share.
I understand this is off topic however I simply wanted to ask.
Kudos!