One of our favourite Gardening Books is Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert and this time of the year it gets brought out and we explore the bulb planting section to see if there are any that we could add to our garden.
Planting a Rainbow is a fantastic book for toddlers and preschoolers that explores plants as well as colours and touches on seasons – we have a board book version and it’s been read so many times the children are also learning plant names.
Autumn Planting with kids
In the UK Autumn is the time to get the garden ready for Spring, bulbs are a fantastic way to introduce colours so after a trip to the garden centre we set about planting bulbs.
First off it was clearing the area – there are a few bulbs already in the soil and once we had dug over the soil we buried these again.
Buying the bulbs gave us an opportunity to read the labels find out how tall they would grow and what colour the flowers would be. It was also a great opportunity to talk about the months of the year as different bulbs flower at different times – whilst we were in the shop as well as looking at the pictures we decided to have bulbs that would flower in different months.
You can buy bulb planters which dig out a set amount of soil but we dug holes in the soil with a spade.
Then placed a bulb in the hole – another fantastic learning opportunity – talk about the roots and the shoot which you will be able to see on most of the bulbs.
Then cover up the bulb.
It’s been exceptional dry this autumn so we watered the bulbs in and now we wait till Spring to see what wonderful Rainbow of Colours we can see.
Check out these ideas to do as well:
Dissect a bulb or the
flower from a spring bulb
Plant a Bulb Lasagne great with older kids to figure out the different heights themselves
Force bulbs a great autumn/winter activity to have flower inside all winter long.