Get Your Kids Outside This Summer with These Garden Activities for Kids of All Ages

It's summertime, and that means we've got kids at home in need of things to do that don't involve screens. Having a garden is a great way to engage your kids outdoors. I started my garden way back when my kids were preschoolers and babies, and it's been incredible to grow my garden through the years with my kids as they've grown up.

Kids actually make for the best gardeners. They're naturally curious, and no one has yet told them they don't have a green thumb. Whether they're teens or toddlers, this summer is the perfect time to get them involved in the garden. I've made a million mistakes as a parent, but the one thing I did right is I started a garden when my kids were small.

Here are 10 of my favorite summertime activities for preschoolers all the way to teens in the garden.

Grow Beans

Growing beans is a really fun and easy summer activity to do at home. Beans are very fast-growing plants, so they're really satisfying to grow from seed. They basically give your kids exactly what they need, which is immediate gratification, right?

You can grow bush beans in a super simple setup. You can do a little container, pot, or grow bag on a porch or patio.

If you want to take it to the next level, you can make a bean teepee. It's easy—you don't even need a raised bed. Just take some bamboo stakes, dig into the ground in a circle so that you can secure your stakes around the perimeter, and then tilt your stakes so that they all meet in the center. Then, right along the outer edge of your circle, plant pole beans (the vining type). Those beans will produce a ton of attractive leaves, climb up the stakes, and then put on flowers and eventually beans.

It's a magical thing for kids to crawl under the teepee to read stories (might I suggest "Jack and the Beanstalk"?), have fun, and pretend they're living in a house in the woods.

The first bean type I love to grow on a bean teepee is hyacinth bean, though you have to be careful with this one because it's not edible. It looks beautiful, though, and grows into hot weather. If your summer temps are in the 90s or higher, then hyacinth bean is a great option.

Another one that's great to grow if it's super hot is the yardlong bean. This bean is crazy! Each bean can literally grow 18 inches long!

If your summers are a bit more mild (like highs around 85°F), you can grow normal pole beans like Kentucky Wonder to vine up your trellis.

You'll find seeds for purple beans, yellow beans, striped beans, so mix it up. This is a super fun, easy summer project you can do with your kids. If you don't do any other ones, do this one. 

Plant Sunflowers

Sunflowers, like beans, grow super quickly from seed. Growing sunflowers was one of my first successful gardening projects. It was my first year gardening, and I had a four-year-old and two babies. So if I could do it then, you can do it! And so can your kids. 

Sunflowers grow so easily from seed. You want to make sure that you've got a nice, level place where you can dig in and prep the soil for those sunflowers. The one mistake we made the first summer we grew them was planting the seeds on a slope. The first summer storm that came through washed all those seeds right down the hill.

There are so many different types of sunflowers you can grow, but you should definitely try some mammoth sunflowers if you want super tall flowers. Mini sunflowers are fun too. Teddy bear sunflowers are my favorite small variety to grow—they just don't have the same wow factor for your kids.

Take a picture each week with your kids standing next to the sunflowers to track their rapid growth. By the end of summer, you'll have flowers that tower over you all. It's pretty amazing to watch.

The really cool thing is your kids can witness something grow from seed to flower and then back to seed. You see the entire life cycle in one season, and you get sunflower seeds!

Create a Toad Habitat

Toads are a great friend to have in your garden space because they eats lots of insects. I know my kids thought toads were the most magical creatures when they were little.

To create a toad home, you can make a little natural pond. Get something as simple as a bucket, or dig in the ground and place a little pond liner in the soil. Fill it up with some water and rocks. You can even add water plants. And voila! You've just created a little habitat that invites toads to live near your garden. They'll lay their eggs so that tadpoles will grow in the water. Then those toads will multiply and make more toads.

You can also create little toad shelters using things like broken terracotta pots turned on their side. Toads love that kind of covered shelter, especially when they're underneath plants, so you could place your little toad home near some tall grass or pollinator-friendly plants.

Once you've set up your toad haven, task your children with going outside and doing some observation every day to see if the toads have shown up. And toads definitely will show up if you have that little water feature for them.

Your kids will get to learn more about animal habitats and watch a toad lifecycle right in your backyard!

Grow Potatoes

If you have mild summers, you can grow regular potatoes, and if you have hot summers, grow sweet potatoes. These can both be planted straight in the ground. You don't need a raised bed or large container (though you can also grow potatoes in a container). Both plants are so forgiving, and you'll be looking forward to your huge potato harvest at the end of the summer with your kids.

That first summer we had a garden, my husband Jason had the idea to plant potatoes, and I'm so glad he did. We grabbed some seed potatoes in the middle of July (so we were super late to be planting potatoes here in Nashville) and handed them to the kids to plant in the ground. We didn't slice them or chit them or anything. Our kids wouldn't have had patience for that. They just stuck them in the ground and put a bit of compost on top.

Fast forward to the beginning of September, we grabbed some beach buckets and gave each of the kids a little plastic shovel. They each filled their buckets and then we did a little weigh-in to see who grew the most potatoes. It was one of my favorite summer activities for the family.

If you're doing sweet potatoes in a hot climate, you'll start with slips instead of seed potatoes. You can actually just plant the sweet potato as is, if you don't want to get too fancy. Otherwise, you'll stick a sweet potato in some water indoors and let it grow leaves. Once leaves form, you'll cut them off, including the root, and that's a slip. You plant the slip in soil and then let the plants work their magic underground.

Both of these plants will grow loads of leaves aboveground, so you've got something to monitor while the tubers are growing. Sweet potatoes send vines everywhere, and the leaves are actually edible. Your kids can have a little snack while they're playing amongst the vines.

Keep a Garden Journal

At the start of the summer, grab some composition books or cheap little journals from Target or Walmart. Let your kids put their art skills to work by decorating the cover to make it their personal garden journal. Have them head outside each day to journal about what's happening in the garden.

What goes inside the journal will depend on their age, their abilities, and their interests. They could draw things they find in the garden. They could record measurements to track growth over time. They could make observations or monitor garden pests. Make sure they write the date so it feels scientific.

Garden journals are an incredible way to just slow down time and connect kids to nature. They're also a great way to keep your kids occupied without giving them screen time, feeling like you have to entertain them, or handing them a list of chores to do in the garden. You could even ask them to turn their journals in to you before they get screens or breakfast or whatever.

By the end of the season, you'll have an amazing record of your garden's progress and your child's abilities at that age. If I could turn back time, I would 100% have gotten my four- and five-year-olds to keep garden journals during those summers when I was trying to come up with all kinds of summer activities outside every day. They would have loved another outlet to be creative, and I would love having those journals to look back on now.

Create a Melon Patch

My kids and I created a melon patch one summer, and it was not at all a success, but we had a lot of fun trying. Growing melons like honeydew, cantaloupe, or watermelon is super fun, but it does require some attention on their part, especially when it comes to watering. You can plant melons in large grow bags, on the edge of your raised garden beds, or in mounds in the ground if you don't have a formal garden set up yet.

To prep an in-ground mound, you can pick a patch without grass or create a lasagna garden on top of your yard (also called sheet mulching). Give yourself at least 3 square feet for each plant and use soil that's been amended with some compost. Plant the melon seeds in the middle of the mound, and then have your kids watch and care for those seeds. Their job is to water daily for the first two weeks to make sure the melon plants get established. As the melons start to grow, they'll need to prune any damaged leaves, ensure the vines don't get run over by a lawn mower (that may or may not have happened to us), and nurture the plant until you start to see fruit forming.

Keep in mind, it takes a long time to get to that point. It will literally take the entirety of the summer to get to the melon part. You're looking at 100, maybe even 120, days. So start now so that you can watch those melons grow throughout the summer and then have a big harvest party before sweater weather arrives.

I can pretty much guarantee you that your kids will love the melons they grew. Homegrown melons are extra sweet and delicious. Your kids will likely be way more invested in their growth than they would be, let's say, kale.

Set Up a Pollinator Habitat

This is a great summer activity for kids of all ages, but for an older child, you could have them do the research on local bees and butterflies and native plants. You'll need to pull together different nesting materials based on the pollinators in your area. I've built habitats with all different kinds of materials—everything from bamboo sticks to pinecones. The idea is just to arrange them tightly to create little hiding places.

For younger kids, help them research what kind of habitats the pollinators need. This is a great way to talk about endangered species and why habitats are so important. Take some time together to build the habitat and then observe it regularly. You could even set your phone up on a tripod and record a time lapse to see when different insects come near the habitat.

This is a really fun way to introduce your child to the concept of ecosystems and help them see how they can make a difference simply by creating a little habitat for the bees and the butterflies this summer.

Create a Smoothie Garden

If your kids are anything like mine, they are gonna love this next project, and that is creating a smoothie garden. My kids love smoothies. They particularly love fruit smoothies with berries, bananas, or açaí, but I like to slip some vegetables into those smoothies, as well.

An easy project to do with them is just plant up a smoothie or juice garden and then have your kids harvest from it.

If you grow kale, Swiss chard, or celery, then you could add some fiber and extra nutrients to your kids' berry smoothies. I wouldn't try to start any of these plants from seed at this point of the year, but you can definitely head to the store to buy plant starts. Regular spinach is hard to grow in the middle of the summer, but you could try out some heat-friendly types like Malabar spinach or longevity spinach. You could even throw in some sweet potato leaves if you're growing sweet potatoes.

Tossing leaves into fruity smoothies is an instant upgrade, and your kids get to experience harvesting something and turning it into a more nutritious drink.

For a juice garden, you could do celery, cilantro, parsley, cucumbers, carrots, beets, and any kind of greens. Homegrown carrot juice? Yes, please!

I do recommend doing a little research before you set up your garden. Maybe test out some juices at the beginning of the summer by going to a juice bar or Whole Foods or something. Let your child try some fresh juices so they can choose their favorite flavors. Then, you can plant out your garden together, grow it, and by the end of the summer, make your own delicious garden-fresh juice and smoothies.

Make a Bird Bath

Summer heating up means things are drying up, and this is a critical time for a lot of our local birds to find water. A simple bird bath can provide water for them right in your garden space.

One simple way to make a bird bath is to literally take a terracotta pot with a saucer, turn the pot upside down, and glue or just place the saucer right on top. Fill it up with water. It's then your child's job to replace the water with fresh water each and every day. The water should always be clean and clear so the birds have a nice little drink all summer long.

The very day we installed a bird bath in my garden space, we set my phone on a tripod and took a time lapse. It was incredible to see all the birds coming in to take a drink.

If you want a chance to watch birds and your kids to experience more nature in your space, creating a bird bath is a magical way to do it.

Put Your Kids in Charge of Cooking at Least One Meal a Week

Finally, you could give your kids at least one meal a week where they are in charge of cooking. And the challenge can be that they have to pick things from the garden to turn into dinner. If you have multiple kids, maybe have each of them take one night a week or assign all your children a joint cooking night. Maybe they each prepare a dish so the family can do a little contest or blind taste test. The judges can decide who did the best job and who maybe needs to take some cooking lessons from Mom or Dad.

This is a great way to connect older kids to the way our food is made, as well as to give yourself a serious break from the kitchen—and who doesn't need that? (Especially in the middle of summer when the kids are there for three meals a day.)

Having kids cook is a fun experiment, and they learn to prepare their own nutritious meals. It is going to be a mess though, so prepare yourself. You could have a rule that if kids cook, kids clean. Our rule is that if you take it out and use it, you're also responsible for cleaning it and putting it back. Feel free to steal that rule from me.

You could inspire your kids to get creative and make all kinds of fun dishes. Check out vegetarian and raw food cookbooks from the library to help them get ideas on how to use up garden-fresh ingredients. They could make little finger sandwiches or sushi rolls with vegetables or herb dips or herb flatbread. They could even make one of those big butter boards with herbs and edible flowers on top. I, for one, would be pretty okay with that. They could roast veggies with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Challenge your kids to be the cook for at least one meal a week. You could even pay them for their contributions. Tell them, "I was gonna go out to a restaurant, but I thought I would, you know, risk my life and let you cook for me instead."

These Summer Activities for Kids Are Really for the Whole Family

Some of these garden-themed projects are perfect for toddlers, while others are ideal for teens. The name of the game is really just getting outside with your kids this summer and making the most of every moment that you have with them. These seasons always go faster than we anticipated.

My oldest is 17 and my youngest is 12. I felt like I would have preschoolers and elementary school kids for my entire life. But turns out, all those people who told me my kids would grow up fast were right. Looking back, my favorite summers with them were always the ones where we would make a bucket list and then slowly check things off. So many of our best bucket list items were connected to the garden.

Make your own bucket list. Hopefully, you'll take a few of these 10 summer projects and get out there and make some magical memories with your kids before summer ends!

Thanks for being a part of Gardenary. We're here to support you along the way, all summer long and for many seasons to come. Whatever you do, don't let this summer pass without digging in the dirt and making the most of these precious moments with your children.