Having a vegetable garden in your back yard is a great way to spend quality time with your kids all year long. Everyone wants their children to eat healthy food, and fresh vegetables taste so much better than anything you can buy at the store. By getting your kids involved in the garden they’ll learn about nature and eating fresh vegetables – something that will last the rest of their lives.

There’s so much your children can learn, whether they’re toddlers or teens. Here are some quick ideas…

Keep an eye on the sun.

Keep a chart of the sun’s progress in a day to determine the best spot for your garden. Where does the sun rise and set? Do a scale drawing of your back yard and mark the shadow lines each hour. A south-facing garden with 6 or more hours of sunlight is best.

How nature works – layers of soil.

Head out to a nearby wooded area and bring a shovel. Show how leaves act as a mulch, how rotting leaves act as compost, and how this makes the soil below dark and rich. Dig even deeper to find the inevitable red clay subsoil. Use the same technique of compost mulch, rich soil and clay subsoil in your own garden. Just add more organic fertilizer at the end of the season and some more compost as mulch on top and you’ll never have to till again.

Easiest is not always best.

Explain how organic gardening compares with fertilizer/pesticide gardening. If a plant isn’t doing well it’s easy to throw on some fast-acting fertilizer. But this results in spindly, weak growth making it susceptible to diseases and insects. When you apply pesticides they end up killing more beneficial insects than bad ones and hurting the microbial activity in the soil. The organic solution is to start with healthy soil, which encourages healthy, disease and bug-resistant plants. It takes a bit more knowledge of how things work, but it’s worth the effort.

The value of patience.

In a world where a TV show lasts 30 or 60 minutes, it’s a great lesson to see gardens that may take two weeks for a seed to sprout and much longer for a harvest.

It’s ok to fail – nothing is perfect.

Another valuable lesson is that not everything in the garden is going to work the way you planned it. Plants die, crops fail. It’s all part of the experience and good gardeners learn from their mistakes and try to fix them next year.

For older children.