Collaborative Post
Parents often have to face a series of challenges when they first have kids. As one of the biggest of these, you will have to go from working on a home which looks great and reflects your personality, to building a space which will be good for kids. For gardeners, this can be particularly difficult, with a huge amount of your life revolving around this space, and the kids wanting to use it as much as possible. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring some of the steps which can be taken to make both work, without impacting one another.
Keeping Flowers Out Of Reach
When games are being played which involve balls or other projectiles, it can be very easy for flower beds to take impacts which they simply aren’t built for. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have flowers or games shouldn’t be played, though, with a compromise like keeping the flowers out of reach being a great route to take. This can be achieved with loads of different tools, but the most popular of them all has always been hanging baskets. Keeping your plants at eye level, this can even improve the look of your outdoor space. If you have a keen footballer in the family, “mark” their garden football pitch using a set of goals so they know the best place to play away from the flowers and garden ornaments.
Making A Hardier Lawn
Keeping a lawn looking good takes an awful lot of work. You will have to mow it every week or so during spring and summer, will have to give it treatments and food to keep it green, and may even have to supply it with water when you’re going through long spells without rain. All of this work will be for nothing if the kids scuff it all up while they’re playing, though. Options like New Lawn artificial grass can keep your garden looking very natural, without the risk of being damaged by normal use. It’s never worth worrying that the little ones are going to make the garden look bad when you have options like this available.
Create boundaries in your garden
If your children know where they should and shouldn’t wander, this will be useful for when you’re trying to protect both them and the plants you are growing. You can do this by using child-proof fencing, be that made of wood or wire, to partition off certain areas of your garden. Alternatively, you could indicate where your precious plants are growing by adding colour marker flags to the soil, as this should be a sign for your children to keep away. If they want to get involved in growing plants and veggies themselves, create a special area that they can call their own, perhaps taking a cue from this article on square foot gardening if your space is limited.
Finding Subtle Storage Options
Outdoor play equipment and toys don’t tend to be the most compact items in the world, often taking up a lot of space and looking unappealing to those who aren’t young. Without a good place to keep these items, though, they will almost certainly be left in a mess. To solve this issue, attractive sheds can be found all over the web. While you might need some help to put something like this up, all of the effort will be worth it, especially once you manage to teach the kids to clean up after themselves.
With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to get started on the time you put into building a garden which your kids won’t be able to ruin. A lot of parents spend too much time worrying about areas like this. When you’ve worked hard to make it look nice, it makes sense that you would want to keep it that way, but it’s also a good idea to consider the fun that the kids could have if you’re not concerned about it.
What tips do you have for creating a garden the whole family can enjoy?
A useful reminder, thank you. I buy soft plastic tops for any stakes that I put in the garden to ensure there are no little faces or hands harmed by pointed stake tops.
Great tips, we moved in august so have to battle the garden this summer xx
CERTAINLY pays to be garden safe – need to do several things in ours this year