Creative ideas for a Family Friendly Garden

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Yay! Spring has arrived (well almost…..there’s still been cold rain, squelching lawns, worms and robins in our garden this week but alongside some daring daffodils!) I am looking forward to our magnolia tree blossoming in our front garden. Magnolias are so gorgeous even if they do make quite a bit of mess. But with the slightly warmer weather, I’ve been thinking about our garden and what we can add to it this year! Our family garden is still kind of rustic, which I do love although the building work to our kitchen wrecked our patio and so top of the list would be a new patio but we might be waiting a while for that one!

Our kids love playing in the garden, they have a playhouse (which was an Ebay purchase a couple of years ago and the bane of Mr Ms life putting it back together) that they love playing dens in and having their secret Goggle Eyes meetings (which is the name of their secret club!) They also have a chalk board which they mostly use for drawing maps on of the house and garden – although they quite like drawing chalk all over the broken up patio too!

The each have their own veggie patch too which soon we’ll sit down and decide what they’d like to grow this year. Every year we’ve chosen something different and every year we have mixed results! The herb garden grew quite well but the fruit trees haven’t really taken off. We had great success with a non-flowering broccoli that took over the whole patch but was just stalk so not much fun to eat! We’ve had some cute nobbly carrots and parsnips and some green beans that got some kind of a disease. But on the whole the best vegetables we’ve managed to grow every year are potatoes and peas – these seem to work the best for us! We’re not that green fingered and so prefer things that don’t need much care or attention. If you’re looking to start your own kid’s vegetable garden, you might find this post useful on how to plant a kid’s rainbow garden and this is a great post on growing peas with kids.

We have a lovely big lawn although it’s a bit bumpy lumpy at the moment because it’s full of anthills! At some point, we’d love to re-lawn the whole garden! I love the feel of real lawn but I can see why some people would choose artificial grass, especially with children and pets. No watering and no mowing – Mr M would be in his element! Artificial grass would be so much better for paddling pools and water play too, ours always end up creating a muddy, squelchy lawn after water play! If you’re considering artificial grass, here’s a great post to read on the subject. If you’d prefer a decking area to use for scooters or hopscotch or water play – I can recommend Birmingham Decking for easy to maintain decking.

So, I’ve found some of the best creative garden ideas that we’d like to try out this year that will mean our kids play out all year long!

Fairy Garden

I love this idea of creating a permanent fairy or dinosaur garden. We’ve had little kits before and loved them but I think a fairy garden would be played with lots. I love this idea of making cute enchanted clay houses to pop in the Fairy Garden. I found this post super helpful in deciding how we should create our Fairy Garden. It takes you through everything you need to know from planning to creating your fairy garden from scratch!

Bug Hotel

Something I know my eldest daughter, Elodie is really keen to make is a Bug Hotel. I’ll be using this tutorial as it helps with how to keep the bugs from eating up your garden! An easier version if you have the space is to create a log pile bug garden like this one from Rainy Day Mum.

Wind Chimes

I love the sound of windchimes in a garden. Last year we made flower pot windchimes and this year I think we’ll try making Seaside Shell Windchimes using this idea from Red Ted Art.

Stepping Stones

One thing I’m looking forward to making is these Chalkboard Stepping Stones! Hopefully this might stop the kiddos trampling over all our veggies!

Bean Tepee

If we can find enough space in our veggie patches, I’d quite like to build the bean tepee for the kids! Such a great idea for a hiding place from Adventure in a Box.

If you don’t have a garden and would like to grow indoors – there are some lovely Eggshell seed growing ideas here. 

As I’m writing this the sun has come out a bit this morning. It’s playing very hard to get, shining for five minutes, then changing its mind and disappearing followed by a ton of rain…… perhaps we’re not quite ready for Spring just yet!