Summer Gardens, Children and Colour

Hello

Spending your summer in the garden is the best way to enjoy the weather and time off. The summer months can be difficult to keep your children entertained all day for six weeks. However, your garden is full of easy and fun activities for children to do.

5 tips for having fun with your children in the garden

Whether they are your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews or children you care for, encouraging a love of gardening by finding things out works for little ones and those who are older.

Yes, you could buy them a child-sized trowel (good idea), but there’s much more fun to be had!  Such as these tips…

1 - Finding new uses for toothbrushes

Toothbrushes make the best small cleaning utensils. Get out your old toothbrushes, fizz up some water with bicarb and a drop of lavender oil and get cleaning. You can clean up old terracotta plant pots, which children can then decorate to make your garden unique. Check out British Garden Centres Young Gardeners' Summer Holidays Blog.

2 - Will the seed germinate?

As this doesn’t work for all seeds, especially at this time of the year, choose packets of hardy annual flowers and beans for a reliable experiment. Sometimes the garden centre has reduced the price of seeds in August, but as you only need a few seeds for this, you’ll be able to sow the remainder in the garden. Gather together seeds, kitchen paper towel, plastic bags, a water spray bottle

• Lightly dampen a piece of towel with the spray
• Lay ten seeds from the same packet onto it
• Cover with another damp towel
• Fold; place in a plastic bag
• Label bag with variety and date

Repeat for each seed variety. Keep the bags warm and moist. They should germinate in 7-10 days.

How many of the 10 have germinated? 5 = 50% viability (easy maths!) Have the different types of beans and flowers got the same germination rate?

3 - Potted Plants and Recycling

Why not ask the children to help brighten up the kitchen theme and use washed food cans as plant pots? For example, instant coffee or syrup, has the advantage of no sharp edges for children to cut themselves on (as compared to the empty baked bean tin). Make holes in the base (you’ll need to do this for younger children) Fill the first centimetre or two with grit to improve drainage

• Add multipurpose compost to about halfway
• Then add the plant, having carefully loosened the roots a little
• Fill around the plant and up to about 1 cm from the top with more compost and gently firm in
• Place on a plant pot saucer to catch the drips and water in

Herbs and individual cut-and-come-again salad leaves are an obvious choice for a kitchen windowsill in coffee tins. Choose plants that are small enough so they don’t outgrow their container too quickly, the 9cm pot size from the garden centre is about right for most.

4 - Magic water

Collect a small spray of white or pale flowers. Fill a water jug and add food colouring. Once this is done, add in the flowers and then wait!

You’ll see the stem change colour from the bottom up, dying the flower petals. This shows children how plants take up water and nutrients.

To make it even more interesting, you can compare different types of stems for speed. For example, will the hollow stem of frothy Queen Annes' lace change colour more quickly than a baby’s breath Gypsophila?

5 - Soil Testing

There are 4 main types of soil and they all feel different. Take some slightly damp soil in your hands and rub it: -

• Clay soil forms a ball that sticks together
• Sandy soil feels gritty when you rub it and falls apart
• Chalky soil crumbles easily and has white stones in it
• Silty soil feels silky

What do you have in your garden? You could also use a soil testing kit to discover whether you have acid or alkaline soil; easily purchased from a garden centre.

Colourful Late Summer Borders

Whilst the drought currently affecting the country does have an impact on our ability to dig holes in the flower borders and keep newly planted shrubs watered, there are ways around this. The two main ones are choosing plants which -

• Will grow happily in pots until they can be planted out in late autumn or spring
• And/or are drought tolerant

Tip for wetting the ground before planting

Keep a bowl in the sink and the bathroom basin. This enables you to save the water from the family washing their hands and use it where you need to dig and plant. Antibacterial soap may not be so good, so check the label.

Shady slightly damp spots

Because not all gardens bake in full sun!

Persicaria like damp soil, partial to mid shade and prefer morning to afternoon sun: generally speaking, the sunnier the spot the damper the soil needs to be. Try dark pink flowered Persicaria ‘firetail’ and the bronze-leaved Persicaria microcephala ‘red dragon’.

Thanks for reading.