Gardening provides an excellent opportunity to bond with your children away from electronic devices, to experience fresh air, sunshine and exercise outdoors, to discover the natural world, and to teach a useful skill. When you turn gardening into a playful and joyous endeavor, you give your child a source of enjoyment that will last a lifetime.
Since most kids love pizza, one way to engage a child’s interest is to create a Pizza Garden. This is a 6-foot-wide giant circle where you grow the toppings for their favorite food. Kids enjoy eating what they grow, so creating this theme garden may also help to expand young palates and improve their diets with fresh, homegrown vegetables and herbs.
Let your child help every step of the way, from drawing the plot on paper, to buying the plants, building the garden bed and installing the ingredients. Sustain interest throughout the summer by aiming to throw a pizza-making party when the harvest is ripe.
We built a demonstration Pizza Garden at the Build-Fix-Grow festival at the Hanford Mills Museum. The marigolds are a colorful representation of cheese, rocks suggest a thick crust and delineate slices, and the missing slice becomes a path to access the harvest.