Gardening with kids isn’t just about growing plants—it’s about cultivating curiosity, creativity, and a love for nature. Whether you have a big backyard, a tiny balcony, or just a sunny windowsill, there are plenty of fun and easy ways to get little hands digging in the dirt.
Today, Sophie Iremonger, a passionate gardener who helps busy expat families create green spaces at home, shares her best tips for making gardening accessible and exciting for kids in 2025. From fast-growing veggies to playful outdoor experiments, these ideas will help your family connect with nature—one seed at a time!
What are your top tips to help kids engage with gardening this year?
Here are four easy ways to get your kids into gardening:
1 Make it easy:
Get big seeds that are easy to pick up for small hands like pea, pumpkin or even a potato! You can even squash whole cherry tomato fruits straight into a pot of soil and put the pot on the windowsill. The seeds will come up!
2 Keep it messy:
Here is an activity for outdoors later in summer: I would start with a small raised bed or flower pot that is designated for kids only – grown ups not allowed!
Some mini tools like small spades and garden forks will be helpful - let your kids own the process. If they want to turn it into a mud bath let it happen.
Later on you can ask to join in and make some suggestions - like planting something. Keep a lid on everything when you aren’t there to stop cats and other other creatures getting in the mix.
3 Get fast results:
Plant speedy seeds like radish that sprout within 2 weeks and are ready to eat within a month - radish seeds are perfect for short attention spans and the colourful roots are fun and easy to pick.
4 Share flavours and textures:
Introduce some pots of different herbs and edible flowers indoors or outdoors.
Ask the kids to harvest you some as part of dinner prep.
Explore tasting them and tearing up the leaves and petals together.
Which flavours do they love? Which do they hate?
Edible flowers: Ringelblume (Calendula) Pansies/Viola
All kitchen herbs like sage, parsley, mint.
How can families with limited outdoor space (e.g. apartments) still enjoy gardening?
Indoor windowsill gardening with things you find in the supermarket is a great place to start.
For example growing fresh pea sprouts from a bag of dried peas (Erbsen).
(Pea sprouts are a real delicacy in gourmet circles, some fancy places sell them in plastic clam-shell boxes for 5€ per 100 grammes!)
Plant the peas in a shallow tray of soil on your windowsill. They are chunky and easy to pick up in little hands.
You can harvest them by cutting the leafy green sprouts with scissors when they are a couple of inches tall. Use them in a stir fry or salad. They are sweet, grow fast and your kids might even enjoy eating them! (vegetable I know, tough call)
It’s a great way of exploring how food grows and gives fast results with minimum effort.
What are some fun, hands-on gardening activities that kids love?
Planting potatoes and onions from the kitchen
Planting flower bulbs with your kids is always a classic but if you have no time for buying flower bulbs you can plant onions and potatoes from the kitchen (you know, the old fellows from the cupboard who are sprouting and looking a bit unsociable). Garlic cloves work too.
Just stick some in a pot and leave it outside. No pot? You can use a bag or even a cardboard box, just make sure it has drainage holes.
Subversive seed walk
Is there a muddy place by the path that you walk regularly with your children?
Get your kids to throw some wildflower seed down every time you pass.
By the end of the summer you should have some fun and colourful results to observe!
(Yes, I am encouraging small-scale guerilla gardening!)
Seed from a wildflower ‘shaker’ (Wildblumenmischung in German) that looks a bit like a pepper shaker can be deployed quickly. You can find that for sale in every garden center and also sometimes in ‘Euro-World’ and ‘MC GEIZ’. Or buy flower seeds in packets and make your own deployment device from an old plastic kitchen herb container.
Sunflower circle
Plant a circle of tall stately Sunflowers with an empty space in the middle to serve as a secret ‘house’ or ‘fort’. As it’s on the ground it’s safer than a treehouse and easier to make.
You can grow sunflowers by throwing the seed down in a circle shape in some mud from May onwards.
Safe plants that work well to make forts/houses/circles:
Beans or sweet peas growing up poles
Sweet corn
Trees with ‘weeping’ foliage that hangs down to make a shelter (beech, hazel, willow)
How can gardening be used as a learning tool for science, math, or creativity?
For science:
Kids connect their food with the world in a bigger sense and when they see how it gets from the shop to their plates. Seeing how seeds sprout and turn into plants is amazing!
For maths:
Guessing how many potatoes you will get at potato harvest time is always fun.
Counting the petals on flowers for young kids is also fun.
For creativity:
The colours of flowers just beg to be made into art! Even adults cannot resist doing this. And then there are the endless creative possibilities of mud…(again)
Do you have any favorite resources (books, websites, tools) to help families get started?
I love going to a nearby forest – the forest is a great garden, classroom and library. (In Berlin, my favorite is Grunewald!)
There, I recommend going on an expedition with a small spade and exploring some tree roots. (Bauhaus sells a great range of mini (but very professional looking) tools just for kids)
I can also recommend the following books:
For the very young: Plant the tiny seed nice board book)
For the older child: Hurrah! est wächst! (hurrah it grows) – good garden projects to do in easy German
Last but not least: What’s one piece of advice you’d give to parents who want to start gardening with their kids but don’t know where to begin?
Keep it simple: start with the windowsill and work from there.
Thanks, Sophie!
