Images courtesy of Click & Grow
Click & Grow smart gardens make a great addition to any home, the ability to grow your own salads, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, peas etc in your kitchen all year round is very rewarding and is particularly great for getting kids to learn about where some of the food on their plates comes from.
Kids will love to help from day 1, by putting the pods into the smart garden, adding water, plugging it in and waiting for the first little shots to appear. Watching the growth day by day is really engaging and when a child watches this process from day 1, they are excited to taste what they have grown.
Click & Grow Smart App - A great way to really engage your kids in the growing process using an app with their smart garden
Click & Grow have a smart app that can be downloaded to your smart phone or tablet, this is a great accessory to enable you and your kids to track the progress of your plants. When you add a pod to your garden on the app, the plant is given a name such as Abigail the Wild Strawberry, these names can be changed if your child decides they want to call a plant by a particular name. You will get notifications in the app from your plants as to what stage the plant should be at and useful tips to help your plants grow successfully. For example your fruiting plants such as tomatoes and strawberries will tell you that you need to hand pollinate the flowers to enable them to produce fruit. This is a great way to teach your kids about nature and the fact that flowers need pollinating in order to produce fruit and to teach them how this happens in their natural environment (outdoors) but as there are no bees or wind indoors, they need to give the plants a helping hand.
Helping kids to learn where the food they eat comes from by using a smart garden to grow their own food and then eating it
Growing their own fruit, salad and herbs can help kids to form a healthy relationship with food, understanding things like the fact that peas don't just appear in the freezers in the supermarket that they have to be grown from little seeds and nurtured to produce the food they are eating, many kids and even young adults don't realise that they grow on plants in pods. They can learn that freshly grown produce is essential for having a healthy body.
Children who live in cities rarely get to see how nature works and how plants grow, smart gardens are perfect to teach them all about this.
Teaching children about how nature works using a smart garden to see every step from seed to food they can eat or watching flowers grow
There are so many things that children can learn from growing plants in a smart garden, things like the importance of light, pollination, water etc. you can teach your child new words like pollination and to use words to describe what is happening with their plants. You can get them to make drawings of plants, explain that the roots drink the water, feeding the plant, the leaves take in light enabling the plant to grow, flowers produce fruit etc, generally the whole thing can be extremely interactive. You will find that every day they will want to see what is happening and will be fascinated by it, I find that everybody who comes into my kitchen, children and adults alike, go straight to the garden to see what is growing.
Click & Grow smart pods contain a smart soil that contains everything the plants need to grow, they are 100% organic, GMO free and with no pesticides, so you are giving your kids food that you know has nothing harmful in it.
Cooking with your kids with the produce they have grown in their smart garden
If you are into cooking with your kids, you can make delicious food with them using food they have grown in their smart garden, top their pizzas with fresh basil and fresh mini tomatoes or slices of peppers, make a pasta sauce and top with slices of tomatoes and sprinkle with chopped herbs that they have grown (that is if you get as far as having enough tomatoes to put on a pizza, I find that as each tomato ripens they tend to get picked and eaten immediately. Little wild strawberries make a delicious topping for ice creams or just eaten on their own as a little sweet treat.
A Click & Grow smart garden is an investment but it is a wonderful addition to your kitchen and your children's lives. The gardens come in many sizes, starting with the Smart Garden 3, then the Smart Garden 9, then the 27 and upwards to a whole wall.
For 10% OFF on all gardens, bundles, and salad green and herb plant pods (3-packs, 9-packs, and mixes) click here or enter discount code JACQUI10 at checkout.
See my other posts for other benefits of owning a smart garden
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