easy vegetables to grow with children?

donna73

Hi, I want to try and grow some vegetables with the help (or hinderance)of my 2 children(2 and 6 years).

Not looking to be self sufficient......yet! just help them to see where the food comes from, save a few pennies! and hopefully get something good to eat.

Dont know where to start really, so looking for something that will be easy.

I havent got a greenhouse, but our utility room is a conservatory type structure, no heating in it, so gets pretty cold at night, but it is very light, could i grow the seeds in pots in there?

we've got a bit of space in the garden for planting into the soil, and plenty of space for containers.

As far as what would be most use to us ,I suppose, tomatoes, cucumber, carrots , potatoes and onions, dont know if any of these are easy though!

any suggestions and advice will be much appreciated

Gabriel-Ernest

Potatoes would be my top tip; you can do them in an old fertiliser sack as long as it's strong enough. To see them coming out of the earth in their natural state is well recommended. Tomatoes would be fun too as they can watch them ripen.

KatrinaC_2

The easiest things I've found to grow are beans and peas. Nice big seeds and big seedlings (which kids love playing with!) and if you grow dwarf varieties they will grow quite happily in pots without canes and so on.

I've never managed to get decent tomatoes and cucumbers to grow, but I've never failed yet with beans.

Kat

angelavdavis

Beans are great because you can have them race each other up their poles! Start them in toilet rolls stood in a seed tray and filled with soil (longer root run required).

Cress - very quick and easy. You can also put some seed into the bottom of an old stocking, fill with damp soil and fasten the end, sit it on a flower pot and make faces so the cress becomes the hair when it grows!

Strawberries are easy to grow, buy the plants, plant in full sun and generally keep them fed and watered and they should produce fruit, a little at first then more later.

Potatoes as suggested can be grown in an old compost bag. Top soil as the shoots appear (earthing up) and then continue growing until the top growth starts dying when you can tip out the bag. Ensure you use compost for this not soil as it is likely to be too heavy to harvest them when you need to.

Tomatoes will need to be started in a heated propagator to be assured of successful germination. I would therefore recommend if you don't have a propagator that you just buy a couple of plants.

Courgettes and Spinach is really easy to grow in pots.

Peas are also quite easy and tasty from the pod.

An alternative is to post a WANTED notice on freecycle for strawberry and tomato plants or even a propagator.

Good luck!

Penelope_Penguin

Hi, Donna!

Mine are a bit older than yours, but loved *helping* at that age. The benefit now is that they take on the watering, some of the weeding, and DD and I spent a lovely morning yesterday planting seeds together. Within the next couple of years I hope that they'll be big and strong enough to wield the lawnmower

If they want to help planting, big seeds are best - pumpkin, cucumber, courgette, sunflower are good.

Climbing beans are one of the heaviest croppers for the amount of space they take, and they also have big seeds. You can run them up a wigwam of canes, and mix them in with sweetpeas for added interest.

Carrot seed can be *broadcast* sown into a square, and will grow well. You can buy seed for mini carrots, so that the children can eat them whole.

Cherry tomatoes can also be grown in pots indoors, and can be eaten straight from the plant.

Best of luck, Penny. x

lisa_cee

ellie sewed her strawberry seed yesterday it says to sew jan/feb but we only bought them the other day so we'll see how they go also got peas for her and babycorn bought a few other bits she can help with !

good luck with what you decide !

cornishpirate

Am feeling old reading this thread

My little darlings have turned into teenagers and it is no longer cool to help in the garden. Every year we would have seperate areas where we would plant carrots , spuds , beans and peas . We would weigh up each patch as we used it and the winner of each section would get an ice cream of their choice

Happy days !:j

donna73

thanks for all the advice everyone! i shall print off this page so i can refer to it. just hope we get some more good weather like today to help us!!

Thanks cornishpirate! i think my son will be more inspired to help if competition is involved will suggest it to him

LJM

we grow cress with our girlies regularly,its a good one as it grows so quickly,potates are great too my oldest grows them at her great nannys every year but were having a go this year and strawberries.were going to go for a variety of things so if one thing doesnt grow all that well we have other veggies to fall back on.hopefully it will all grow fine fingers crossed as im new to all this

nixinix

Hi,

I am a complete novice gardener - as far as I have gone before is to but extortionatly priced plants from a garden centre because they look pretty and then plant them and hope they like it where I have put them...really technical!!

However I have suggested to my son (2 1/2) that we should plant tomatoes and he is really taken with the idea. I would like to take this a step a little further and plant other easy to look after (I have a 1 year old as well)vegtables (onion? peppers? carrots? potatoes?....no idea what is easy or hard!) BUT in pots as I want to move house this year and would like to take everything with me.

So please could somebody tell me the best way to start and when to start this new project? Oh, and what about Sunflowers...any advice there as well please?

I am a regular lurker on these forums but don't often post but I knew this would be the best place for advice!

Thank you
Nicola

WestonDave

Good luck with this - my 3 year old has been helping me with our garden - getting it ready for our first attempt at serious veg growing this year.

You can grow a lot of things in pots, the question in your case would appear to be portability. I would therefore suggest that things like potatoes which need fairly large containers might be hard to shift come moving day. That said you can grow spuds in an old compost bag (punch a few holes in it, and start with about 1/3rd full of compost - as they grow fill it up to cover the potatoes and avoid them going green) and if you move before the bag gets too full it won't be too hard to move.

There are special varieties of globe shaped carrots which do very well in pots, lettuce grows fairly quickly and can go in relatively shallow pots. I noticed the other day in the local garden centre that Fothergills do a special range of seeds for growing in containers so they might be worth a closer look as the varieties will be right for what you have in mind.

You can grow cherry tomatoes in hanging baskets which might be a good way to keep them portable - they are about the only thing you can start this early in the year indoors, but I suspect they will be ready to go outside (sizewise) before the weather is warm enough so you may be better waiting towards March sort of time.

Courgettes are supposed to be one of the easiest to grow - never tried because I've only recently got to like eating them (don't grow what you won't eat!)

Some fruit will grow well in pots - DS and I got some strawberries going from seed (Suttons) last year although we didn;t get much fruit (probably due in part to the poor summer) they are now in a pot on the patio so you could do likewise and move them when you go. Blueberries have to go in pots due to liking acid (ericacious) compost so again you could look at one of these.

We also did runner beans in a big pot with poles up it - that might be difficult to move, but dwarf french beans are easy enough to grow (they are sold as "fine beans" in the shops) and would be small enough in size to move on.

Hope that gives you a few ideas - in terms of timings I'd suggest having a look at the back of seed packets of things you might like to try as they will have the relevant dates on (sow indoors, outdoors, plant out harvest etc) and they vary slightly from type to type.