Making Gardening Fun for Kids: Plant Potatoes!

Potatoes are a surprisingly fun vegetable to grow in your garden.  We've grown basic white potatoes and sweet potatoes and they're equally fun to harvest in the fall.

 

1. Work together: We've figured out a system over the years to harvest the potatoes as a family. We each have a job: Dad digs, Mom carries the dead plants to the compost and the kids take turns spotting and carrying potatoes to the container.  It's a good way to feel close as a family when everyone is working well together. :-)

2. Dig for treasure: Whether the kids are watching as someone else digs, or they're digging themselves, it's exciting to find the 'treasure' (potatoes) and it never gets old!  Each time they spot more potatoes they light up and shout as if they've found gold.

3. Play in the dirt:  I've mentioned the joy kids get out of playing in the dirt before, but it's worth mentioning again.  Allow them to get dirty, find worms and bugs and maybe even make little worm and bug families!

4. Size differences:  Kids like going through and finding the BIGGEST potato and the itsy bitsy baby potato.  It's not only fun, but learning how to sort sizes is educational too! :-)

 

5. Fun food: Potatoes make all sorts of fun foods, but the kids' favorite would have to be French Fries!  It's easy to make them healthy just by baking them instead of frying.  Baked Sweet Potato Fries are THE BEST! :-)

 



This is the third installment of my "Making Gardening Fun for Kids" series. Click here to visit the previous posts.