Spring Gardening with Children: Best Vegetables to Grow with Kids|New Zealand Life!

Every year, we plant some vegetables in our garden at the start of spring.

Even when we only had a small space in our garden, we had in our garden to place planters and pots, to grow some vegetables.

Children love sowing seeds and watering. They love it even more when plants start to grow day by day.

And they get a real excitement and a sense of achievement when vegetables are harvested in their own little vegetable garden!

Growing your own vegetable is the best way for children to learn values of food AND get them to start eating more vegetables!

But looking after a large field of vegetables can be a hard work at the same time as looking after little children.

So I chose below a few best plants I like growing with children. These can be grown in a small space and are easy for beginner gardener.

Choice 1: Radish

Radish are perhaps the easiest and fastest grown garden vegetables.

Small red radish can be harvested in 30 days after sowing seeds in warm season.

You do not need much space to grow these radish; a long planter can accommodate two rows of radish easily.

After sowing seeds, they start germinating after only a few days, and they grow fast day by day.

Because they grow so fast, children do not get board of watching and watering them everyday.

One thing to be careful though, when the base of the radish plant start to become round, children get more and more urge to pick them.

So when they start to say “I think they are ready, can I pick them!?!?”, you have to stay firm and tell them to wait.

While growing radish is a real exciting experience, not many children would say “I love radish! Radish are my most favorite food!”.

One of the best way to eat radish with children is to cook them in a miso soup. You can wash and chop up both radish root and leaves, to eat the whole thing.

You can also make a pickled radish by slicing radish root and marinating them for a few hours in some sushi-vinegar. (Sushi-vinegar is mild and sweet so many children can eat pickles using sushi-vinegar).

Mixed radish from our vegetable garden last autumn.

Choice 2: Cherry tomatoes

Growing vegetables in your garden costs some money for fertilizers and seeds. So often it is cheaper to buy vegetables rather than growing them.

But out of many vegetables, apparently tomatoes are easy to get the value back.

This is because tomato plant if grown right, bears many fruit over the summer and the retail price of tomatoes being more expensive than many other vegetables.

Especially easier tomatoes to grow is cherry tomatoes.

Their fruits are smaller and faster to mature. It is fun to watch them flower, grow in size and start to change color in the sun.

Growing well! Pot-planted cherry tomatoes.

You can grow cherry tomatoes from seeds, but they can also be grown from seedlings.

Some grafted tomato seedlings are very strong against disease and especially easy to grow.

So you may like to buy grafted tomato seedling from a local gardening store; better seedlings to start with, easier and more successful it will be for beginners.

Note that some type of tomatoes grow like a tree or mini-bush, while others will stay pot-sized.

Depending on the space available in your garden, you should choose the type of tomatoes or cherry tomatoes to raise.

Choice 3: Strawberries

Kids love strawberries. If you plant them, you can enjoy pick-your own strawberries in your very garden!

Strawberry flowers are white with round petals, yellow in the middle. So they are very nice to watch.

As flowers will bloom one after the other and it is a great fun for children to watch the middle part of strawberry flower enlarge gradually, eventually starting to turn red.

They are easy and fast to mature, so children will not get bored; instead, they will be checking them every day, saying “are they ready yet!”

Strawberries are grown from seedlings that are available from local gardening stores.

You can grow them on a field, or in planters and pots.

In New Zealand, you can enjoy strawberry fruits growing from spring till summer.

If you plant one- or two- strawberry seedlings, you will not have enough strawberries to feed the whole family, but will be enough to enjoy watching them grow.

If you want to get more serious and grow enough to eat, you apparently need 5x plants per person in your family.

I found the following website useful for learning how to grow strawberries.

https://www.palmers.co.nz/top-10-tips-for-growing-strawberries/

Finally, if growing strawberry yourself is not right, how about picking your own strawberries in a farm?

There are many ”Pick your own strawberry" farms throughout New Zealand. They usually are open to public people to pick their own strawberry over the summer.

Choice of Tree: Citrus (Orange, Lemon, Mandarin)

If you want to grow a fruit tree, easy and highly recommended are citrus trees.

They are relatively easy to grow, and once the tree reaches certain size, they will bear many fruits.

Some fruits trees like blueberries require two or more of different types of trees to be planted together to bear fruits. But this does not apply to citrus.

Citrus flowers are white and small, but very cute in appearance too.

If you plant lemon tree, you can make lemonades with children using lemon they picked themselves.

Or you can just eat it fresh if you plant a mandarin or orange tree. Either way, children love picking fruits off the tree!

Small seedlings are weak against insects, so do look after them properly when you just planted a seedling.

Once my friend had a mandarin tree completely stripped off leaves by voracious caterpillars.

Small citrus trees for planting are available from local gardening stores.

Make sure to purchase a seedling tree from proper gardening store; grafted seedling grown by professionals start bearing fruits much earlier than a random seedlings that have grown from fruit seeds.