Instant Children's Garden

For years I have wanted to create an herb garden for my children, somewhere  they can not only dig in the dirt, but also where they can be a part of the entire process from seed to table. Each spring, I have high ambitions to finally create that garden, but get overwhelmed by the prospect of either digging, amending, fencing and planting a garden, or building a raised bed, especially with two very young children in tow. This year, however, we found the perfect solution. You'll have to forgive me for forgetting the name, but we found this wonderful instant raised bed garden at our local nursery. It is made from a plastic PVC snap together frame which slides inside of a black fabric sack. It assembles in literally five minutes and comes in various sizes. The wonderful thing, aside from immediate satisfaction, is that you can put it anywhere, reuse it year after year, and it's not permanent., so you can take it with you, move it, etc.

We chose a 72" long x 26" wide x 14' high model. It is the perfect height and width for  the children to both see over and reach across, being able to access the entire garden. It took five bags of soil to fill, and viola! we had a garden!  We chose a mixture of child friendly, edible, culinary and medicinal plant starts and seeds, planting half the garden with the starts, the other with the seeds. The planting went quickly and the children enjoying digging holes for the starts and sprinkling the seeds (though my idea of rows didn't quite work out). We'll have to see where everything ended up as the seedlings grow. Initially, we didn't fence it, but discovered that the cats had found it a few days in, so we installed a cheap but effective (and removable) fence.

After only two weeks, we had sprouts! It's now been three or four weeks since we planted and everything is really growing beautifully. The children are so excited to see the fruits of their labor already. We have big plans for out plants, some for use in recipes, some for medicine, some just for fun. We've listed the plants we chose below, and some ideas for other child-friendly plants you could use in your garden. We would have loved to plant all of them, but ran out of space. Oh well, there's always next year !

So get planting! We'll be posting the progress of our garden and the ideas, projects, medicines and recipes that we create with the bounty of our garden.

Here are the plants we chose:

Lavender              Thyme                     Oregano                 Catnip                 bare root Echinacea (purpurea)

Lemon Balm        Strawflower            Statice                    Hyssop              Calendula     Edible flower mix

Borage                Spearmint (planted elsewhere)                Chamomile


Other ideas:
Rosemary           Peppermint               Pineapple sage              Lemon Verbena           Comfrey

Sage                   Cilantro                     Dill                 Parsley             Strawberries