Get Kids Involved in Gardening with Tools from the Home Depot

Last weekend, my son and I spent some time in the yard. I remember gardening with my mom when I was a child. We had a big yard, and I would help dig holes, or rake. Often, my job was to bring water to my mom and aunt as they worked in the sun. My favorite part was watching the plants grow.

At four years old, Little Moore hasn’t really had the chance to see a plant grow. It was time to change that. Time to get him excited about gardening. I started by taking him on a shopping trip to The Home Depot to pick out some gardening tools. We picked out big gardening tools for me, small gardening tools for him, and gloves for both of us. The gardeningtool he was most excited about was the garden sprayer, which is no surprise to me.

Unfortunately for him, we didn’t get to use the garden sprayer until the end. We had to start by putting our gloves on…

Gloves are probably my favorite tools. They keep my hands protected from all the sharp and pricklies in the yard. I’m always sore after a day of pulling weeds… but if I do it with gloves on, then my legs and back may be aching, but my hands are fine.

While weeding, I pulled out the rake regularly. Because I’d had the sprinklers on for some time before the weeding began, the rake easily pulled out a large chunk of the weeds in the yard, leaving me with much less to pull by hand.

For weeding in the rocks, the action hoe was perfect. It really gets between and under the rocks to pull out the weeds without having to bed over and pull them individually.

Between pulling the weeds from the rocks and from the lawn area, we ended up with a lot of weeds. More than we could get in the garbage!

Weeding a yard is probably one of the most tedious tasks on the planet, but we managed to make it fun. While working on the yard, we found several ladybugs to keep us company. LM was thrilled to have one crawl on his hand.

We also took some breaks to make sure that the sprinklers were working. Getting to turn on and off the water, and getting to run though the sprinklers, is a fun treat and turns yardwork into play time.

Once the lawn area was weeded, we convinced my husband to run over the lawn with the lawn mower. I would have done this, except I have no idea the last time that mower was started, and was afraid of complications. I might have preferred running to The Home Depot and picking up a new lawnmower, but hubs got some new gas, started the mower just fine, and then mowed the yard which was less lawn and more weeds!

Once we finished up with the yard, adding more fertilizer and grass seed, we were ready to work on the planter bed. This was Little Moore’s favorite spot. He loved digging in the dirt with me to put in the potted tomatoes and bell peppers, and he REALLY loved digging holes to put in seeds.

Then came the best part… watering the plants…

 Later this week I’ll be sharing with you how the garden is growing… with a couple fun surprises!