Children’s Gardening Week

2nd June 2021

This year, Children’s Gardening Week is from the 29th of May until the 6th of June. It’s a great excuse to get everyone outside and despite a lot of the event being aimed at younger children, we’ve been able to compile some activities suited to lower-school aged kids.

Our first activity is creating a hedgehog feeding station. This is a fantastic way to support local wildlife and is really easy to do! Full instructions can be found on the Children’s Gardening Week website (here), but to summarise, the home can be created using a large plastic tub, newspaper, tape and some hedgehog food. After carefully cutting a 10cm x 10cm hole to act as a door and taping the edges, newspaper and food can now be placed inside for hedgehogs to access. We’d even suggest going a step further and painting the outside of the box to jazz it up a bit!

Our next activity is a new take on cress heads. Rather than drawing faces on eggshells, clear plant pots can be used, enabling you to add in a picture of your choice. This can be a fun drawing, magazine cut-out, or as the Children’s Gardening Week website suggests – a printed out photo of yourself!

Lastly – and this is a bit more of a long-term activity – there are loads of resources online about growing your own food. This YouTube video explains the process of planting and growing your own potatoes, which is a great way to get everyone together for a fun project with an exciting outcome.

For more ideas, there are lots more activities on the Children’s Gardening Week website. We hope this inspires some of you to get involved with gardening, and remember not to use sharp tools without a parent or carer present.