First garden with 4 year old...

This is my first post. We live in East Tennessee (Zone 6b). We want to start a vegetable garden with our 4 year old. What are some good plants to try? We hope to try a raised bed. We live in the suburbs, so space is an issue. We figure we shall have a 4' by 8' garden. I'd like to make this fun for our daughter, but educational and yummy, too.

Thanks for your help!

Beans are good, the seeds look like what you're used to seeing on your plate. A cherry tomato plant is a great kid-plant, they're pretty easy, prolific and very yummy. If you've got good soil for it, carrots are fun to pull up and see the orange root coming out. Corn takes a lot of space, so I'd recommend against it. Strawberries are fun for kids, too. Is there anything special she's particularly fond of? I'd try to work that in, too.

Have fun! My 3 and 5 year olds are out there turning into my veggie helpers, and lovin' it! I think it's great for kids to understand where food comes from, and what it's supposed to taste like, plus the satisfaction that comes from getting to eat something you grew yourself.

I am going to have my 3 year old grandson help me plant this year. In a few days - this weekend - we will start lettuce mixes, mesclun, spinach, and several types of peas in my large containers. I think he will find it fun. He can help sprinkle the salad greens and push peas into the soil.

Later, we will plant lots of other seeds and plants. I will plant beans, cucumbers, squash seeds and then tomatoe and pepper plants. I have 6 large containers and many smaller 5 gallon buckets. For sure I will get cherry tomatoes that I like and those yellow plum tomatoes that I do not like but kids like. I am not sure he will like peppers but they get to be pretty colors. I am also planting flowers and have lots already in my main garden but I do not know if they will interest him. We will see. He likes the bird feeders and wind chimes.

I can still remember our garden in N MN when I was about to turn 6.

Radishes, peas, beans, cabbages, beets, rutabagas, and strawberrys were my favorites. Especially the pole beans - the poles were at a 60 degree angle, so harvesting from the "inside" was easy and fun - they just dangled in front of me.

Planting anything was fun. Parents explained how many seeds, how far apart, and how deep, and showed me, then allowed me to plant the remainder of each row.

And don't forget sunflowers! We are going to grow a sunflower fort for the grandbabies this year. :)

When my kids were small, I always let them have their "own" little piece of garden. They planted one tomato (grape or cherry tomatoes are fun for kids), a couple of green bean plants and lots of radishes in all the little empty spots around their other plants. The radishes are wonderful for kids since they grow so fast. They were always so impatient to harvest something from their little garden plot! My "kids" are now 33 and 35 and both still love to garden. Now I'm working on my 8-year-old granddaughter and 12-year-old grandson. They just love getting to come to our house and have their own little garden.

Wow! Thanks for all the great advice! We shall get busy on these wonderful suggestions.

Getting your kids involved in the garden is a lot of fun. I have two boys that got their own little buckets and shovels to sit at the edge of the garden as soon as they were old enough to not tip over! (Not that it would hurt much if they did, unless they fell on a tomato cage).

My boys' favorites are beans (easy to pick), watermelons (easy to find), and the herb garden. Watermelons take a TON of space, though. The herb garden is great, because they can wander over and pluck off a leaf of sage or basil or chives and chew on whenever they get the urge, all summer long. My 9 yo has already been out to see if there were any sage leaves to snag (his favorite). They also both love, love, love to grow snapdragons. They look like a little dragon head, and if you gently pinch the corners of the "mouth" (like if you pinch your cheeks on both sides) it will open the "mouth." This never fails to delight them.

This year we want to try potatoes and some kind of strawberry bag or pot.

Just a warning on the cherry/grape tomatoes. The plants get HUGE, bigger than a standard tomato plant. My boys planted cherry tomatoes a few years ago, when they were 3 and 6, and it was great fun. I have pictures of them holding a bowl of their first harvest, another as they were about to take the first taste, and then their expressions of disgust as they realized they tasted like TOMATOES, not cherries! LOL

Have fun!

Booker

My 5-yr-old grandson is my gardening buddy, just like his dad was years ago. He gets distracted, but loves the digging part. I want to grow some pumpkins for his Jack-O-Lantern this year so he can watch them as they develop. When he was 3, anything he could not identify with his 3-yr-old vocabulary was called an "acorn", so we had some dendrology classes and he can identify acorns as acorns now.