Creating A Gorgeous Homeschool Spring Garden
I’m going to be open and upfront here…I don’t like winter! I’m sitting here right now watching it snow and thinking, man, I’m ready for spring and planting my garden. How about you? It’s been so cold and nasty out that my kids are playing inside, and quite frankly, they’re going stir crazy. What’s a mama to do in weather like this? Well, I can tell you with certainty one thing NOT to do: don’t sit around and mope! Get a new hobby, a project or…plan a homeschool garden😍
A homeschool garden??? What’s that?
I’m so glad you asked! Where we live, we have four seasons. Our winters are cold and dreary, our springs are beautiful, our summers are hot and humid, and our autumns are usually lovely but too short. So, we really, really love spring. And one of our very favorite things to do as a family is plant our garden! (We love spring so much we plan our homeschool year around it so we’re out of school for the beautiful weather instead of the hot muggy weather).
Our children all love helping take care of the garden so we involve each of them in the entire process. Right now, we’re in the planning phase and also the ordering phase. This year we are working on a major expansion of our gardens and hope to grow the vast majority of our food in the next few years. Our kids are excited about this also. They greatly enjoy browsing through seed catalogs with us and helping to pick out different varieties. This is fantastic for them as they learn about plants and the history of different plant varieties. As a family, we are big into heirloom fruits and vegetables so our children learn lots of geography and history without even realizing it!
In just a few short weeks, we will start our seeds for our sets. This year we’re doing something new in that department and starting our seeds outside in miniature greenhouses. All the kids got to help their dad build these mini greenhouses that he then fastened to the top of our raised beds. Not only did they get to practice carpentry, but they got to experience how solar power works as we were all amazed at how quickly the raised beds with the greenhouses on top heated up versus the ones without them.
Very soon, we will do a test germination on many of the seeds we saved last year to make sure they are viable. This will be a fun, practical project for our kids to take part in, or we will do some science study on the seed and its parts. You don’t have to know all of that information to grow a garden, but it helps to expand their knowledge and therefore grows not only plants but also grows their brains!
My very favorite thing in our homeschool garden will be planting time! Our kids absolutely love getting their bare feet in the dirt, finding worms and sowing seeds. Not only do they learn hard work and perseverance through all of this, but they also get to experience the joy that doing work together as a family can bring. We try to strike a balance between expecting perfectly straight rows and understanding that kids don’t always see things as tidily as adults do. We try to teach excellence while at the same time giving leeway so everyone enjoys themselves. Sometimes, honestly, it can be a bit hard to strike the balance, but we try very hard to. Because ultimately, we want our kids to feel like they are a necessary part of this process and hopefully go on to make this a part of their adult lives.
I could go on and on about the things our children learn through our homeschool garden, and truly it is an amazing teacher! But mostly, I hope this has been an encouragement to you to start one yourself. It might be just the solution you need for these cold days of winter!
Jenny is a wife to her amazing husband of 17 years and stay-at-home momma to 4 kids. She blogs at https://www.inconvenientfamily.com where she is learning that blessings aren’t always convenient.
