Fall Bucket List: Plant a Fall Garden

Right off the bat let me tell you that I don't have a green thumb. Like not even a little bit. But toddlers like being outside and they like dirt and tools, and gardening just happens to encompass all those things. Bonus points if anything we plant actually grows. 

The great thing about gardening with kids is that you can tie so many activities and lessons into it. Like responsibility for keeping something alive. Or drumming up interest for eating veggies by watching them grow. Fingers crossed that actually works. I'm also thinking in the future we can build a birdhouse or a hummingbird feeder.

Here are the activities we did to start our little garden:

1) Check out gardening books from the library. 

Ez loves books of any kind. He's gotten really great at memorizing books from start to finish, so story time is always appreciated by him. These are the books we checked out:

• The Pumpkin Book: We had to get this one, because, hello! Pumpkins! It was a little advanced for a two year old, so I just improvised and shortened it. The pictures were nice though. I'm thinking this is geared more toward 4 and up.
• The Tiny Seed: This one is all from the seed's point of view, and was a great visual to go along with our seeds, but again, a little wordy for a two year old.
• The Curious Garden: This one was my favorite. Great story and great pictures, but not so much info on actual gardening. Still on the lookout for the perfect toddler gardening book, if anyone has any recommendations!

2) Pick out seeds. Everything we're growing is edible. That's just my personal preference, but I've always thought it would be fun to have my own little veggie garden. Ez didn't care too much for seeds. The gardening tools were more his jam.

3) Make plant markers. 

We went super simple here with a color coding system. I found broken pieces of brick in the yard then Ez painted each one based on the color of the veggies on the seed packet. Purple for eggplant, green for kale & spinach, orange for pumpkin, and yellow for beets (they're rainbow colored beets). There are way cuter ones on Pinterest for the more ambitious gardeners out there.

4) Get digging! 

Ez liked this part a lot, even though his version of digging was mainly just beating the ground with a trowel. Then we sprinkled the seeds in rows, covered them up, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. 

As you can see, Declan is a fan of gardening too:

Oh, and we remembered to water!

We'll keep you posted if anything actually grows ;)

Anyone else plant a fall garden lately? What are some good fall and winter plants?

Here's our bucket list so far:

Today I'm linking up with the teaching together blog hop:

Start here to check out all the other fun learning activities.