Wednesday Wisdom: Garden Together and Watch Your Family Blossom (guest post)

‘Children, marriages and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get’ – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. 

Better still, combine all three and cultivate the perfect environment for your garden and your family to bloom. With seven in ten moms working and kids over-scheduled with after-school activities, it’s never been more important to make the most of precious family time together. Gardening may just be the perfect solution! If children and their parents can find the time to come together to achieve a common goal, be it starting up a vegetable patch or building a butterfly garden, they will soon feel the benefits that gardening brings.

Ditch the screens and get outside

Studies show that gardening together has many positives for your family’s health, diet, fitness and general wellbeing. Just being outdoors and breathing fresh air is a great place to start. In this hectic, technological age, children spend far more time inside than ever, being taxied between scheduled activities or glued to screens, so encourage them to step outside and engage with the real, natural world.

Photo Credit: Elaine Casap @ecasap

Photo Credit: Elaine Casap @ecasap 

Spending time in the garden can be so therapeutic to your family’s mental health too; connecting with nature and seeing your plants flourish triggers happiness, reduces stress, boosts the immune system and keeps depression at bay. Working together as a team is especially beneficial for children too, as it encourages discussion, teaches responsibility, helps concentration and improves patience as they wait for their seedlings to grow.

Bond over your beets

Getting your hands dirty is what gardening is all about and finding out about the seasons, planting cycles, conservation and wildlife is an education in itself. Children love to explore and discover the world around them, so let them experience the garden with all their senses – tasting ripe fruits, listening to wildlife, identifying plants, smelling fresh blossom, and pressing seeds into the soil. Spending time together gives parents the chance to teach their children about the environment around them, so it is a great way to help nurture their minds as well as their green fingers.

Planning and designing garden projects is a great way to get your child involved and to make them feel part of a team. And, no matter your age or the size of your yard, there is always a job for everyone in the garden. Making planters or planting seeds in egg shells are simple but effective ways of tending to your garden that the whole family can do. Through this shared work, comes a sense of pride, achievement, responsibility and cooperation, as well as an opportunity to strengthen those family bonds.

A great reason to go outside this summer: Spending time in nature can teach your child how to care about others. washingtonpost.com/news/parenting…

Dig yourself healthy

Added Incentive: The average adult burns off 240 calories an hour while gardening. Coupled with the physical exercise of digging and planting, gardening is a great activity for you and your family to keep fit. Families tend to eat more healthily too if they are enjoying the home-grown fruits and vegetables of their labor. Bonding with your family in the garden can be fun, healthy and pleasurable, and is a chance to grow a lifetime of memories. Who knows, you may even have a crispy salad or a bunch of flowers to show for it too!

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Share your gardening photos with us!

Submitted by Jenny Holt 

freelance Writer, mom of 2