Living on a homestead, you grow your own food.  Maybe just a small garden at first, but it’s a big part of having a homestead.  The kids need to learn how to grow their own food, too.  Let’s get them started ASAP, so they know from a young age that growing your own healthy vegetables and fruits is just part of life.  If we can make it as fun for them as possible, they may even get so excited, they actually eat some vegetables!

I’m going to have the kids start out by planting the seeds indoors and watching them sprout and grow.  Then they can help me transplant, weed, harvest, mulch and any other garden chores that need to be done.  Making seed starting fun is as easy as giving them toy trucks to play in the dirt with.  They filled all the pots with a backhoe and a dump truck.

Once the pots are full, pick out your seeds.  The bigger seeds are easiest for kids to handle, so squash and gourds are ideal to start.

All I am doing is reading the planting instrutions on the packet and directing the kids to do what the packet says.  I do plenty of explaining about where the root comes out of the seeds and why the bigger seeds are planted deeper, even if we think they aren’t listening, they do hear some of it.

Once they start to see the plants grow, then they get excited.  They could even get so excited that they actually eat vegetables.

The best part of this whole project is that since it is so fun to play in the dirt with toy trucks that I don’t have to fill seed pots.  They do them all!