Contact your local county extension office for gardening information and support.

Grow It, Try It, Like It! Nutrition Education Kit is a garden-themed nutrition education kit for child care center staff that introduces children to: three fruits – peaches, strawberries, and cantaloupe, and three vegetables – spinach, sweet potatoes, and crookneck squash.

The kit includes seven booklets featuring fruits and vegetables with fun activities through the imaginary garden at Tasty Acres Farm! It also has a CD-ROM with supplemental information and a DVD with Cool Puppy Pup’s picnic and lunch parties. Each set of lessons contains: hands-on activities, planting activities, and nutrition education activities.

Use the kit to promote learning at home with fun parent/child activities and family-sized recipes that give tips for cooking with children.

Grow It, Try It, Like It! Fun with Fruits and Vegetables at Family Child Care is designed to help Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) operators provide garden-based nutrition education for children ages 3 through 5 years old in family child care settings.

Through the activities in Grow It, Try It, Like It!, children touch, smell, feel, and taste new fruits and vegetables. Children also learn how fruits and vegetables grow. Planting activities help children connect the delicious food choices at the table with the farm, orchard, or garden.

Discover what fruits and vegetables are sweetest, crunchiest, and juiciest through a series of investigations and fun experiences connecting the school garden to the classroom, school cafeteria, and home. This eleven-lesson curriculum for 3rd and 4th grades includes bulletin board materials, veggie dice, fruit and vegetable flash cards, and ten issues of Garden Detective News for parents/caregivers.

Explore a world of possibilities in the garden and on your plate using ten inquiry-based lessons that engage 5th and 6th graders in growing, harvesting, tasting, and learning about fruits and vegetables. A parent booklet and poster set are also available.

Dig into your knowledge of school gardens!

Now that students have a deeper understanding
and appreciation of the colorful world of fruits
and vegetables, it is time to learn where these
foods come from. Students will discover that all
fruits and vegetables start as seeds and grow
into plants. They will also feel a sense of pride
and accomplishment when they get a chance to
grow something themselves.

Hands-on gardening with young children tunes their taste buds to fresh fruit and vegetables and the enjoyment of healthy eating early in life. The sensory impact of gardening creates a positive understanding of how seeds turn into plants helped by soil, sun, water—and human care. Young children learn essential gardening skills for healthy living: planting, caring, harvesting, and ultimately preparing tasty eating experiences. Designated production gardens in childcare center outdoor learning environments can inspire lifelong healthy eating habits and provide replicable models for the families they serve.

As part of our family, you join more than 9,700 garden programs in the US, UK, and Canada that are growing healthy kids!

The American Heart Association is calling all schools and educational facilities interested in connecting children to gardens, addressing food access concerns in their neighborhoods, supporting health, nutrition, and environmental stewardship to be a part of our mission by joining our new Teaching Gardens Network.

10 years ago, the American Heart Association teamed up with noted child-nutrition activist and philanthropist, Kelly Meyer, to create the American Heart Association Teaching Gardens® program. Over the last decade, the American Heart Association Teaching Gardens program has launched over 500 Teaching Gardens nationwide.

Looking for general resources and information for your school garden?

The intention behind this compilation of resources is to identify tools that can help SGSOs begin to do some of the work to answer these big questions and find the best ways to intertwine equity, inclusivity, diversity, and justice into all aspects of each school garden support organization.

Through our Garden Grant program, schools turn outdoor spaces into powerful hands-on learning gardens that connect kids with food, spark their curiosity and support classroom curriculum.

These grant programs allow for schools and non-profit organizations to receive support for educational beehives and bee programming so students can observe bees up close and learn about the vital role these pollinators play in our food system.

With over a million members, we are the largest social media website dedicated exclusively to gardening.

We teach people how to get started gardening and improve their plant growing skills.

We have online tools that help gardeners connect, teach, share, and trade with each other.

We help gardeners research information through the continuous development of the world’s largest database of plants.

We conduct gardening market research for the lawn, garden, and nursery industries.

We help gardening companies reach the public with their products, services and messages.

Examples of the outreach programs provided by the Penn State Extension Master Gardener Program include:

Demonstration Gardens/Field Days
Environmental Stewardship projects
Garden Hotline
Healing Gardens/Horticultural Therapy
Plant Clinics
Plant Sales
Pollinator programming and outreach
Seed to Supper Program
Speakers Bureau
Spotted lanternfly programming and outreach
Youth Gardening Education/Summer Camps

The Edible Schoolyard Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the transformation of public education by using organic school gardens, kitchens, and cafeterias to teach both academic subjects and the values of nourishment, stewardship, and community.

We integrate garden and cooking activities into the regular classroom curriculum to support the development and education of the whole child. We aim to teach students to grow, cook and eat fresh food while celebrating the cultures and experiences of our students and our city.

School gardens are an integral part of farm to school programs and offer a multitude of educational opportunities. This fact sheet offers steps and considerations for starting a school garden, including: collaboration, goals and design, funding, planting, maintaining, supplies, curriculum and benefits.

Penn State Extension Master Gardeners in 58 Pennsylvania counties are trained to answer residents’ questions about gardening, on topics such as soil testing, growing vegetables, plant selection, pruning fruit trees, common plant diseases, insect identification, lawn care, and more.

There is a delicious secret hiding at Sweet Potato Hill. The other plants show off their fruits and vegetables during the growing season. On the hill, the potatoes stay hidden in the ground until harvest time. The children will not be able to hide their delight in learning about this sweet vegetable; it grows in many varieties. Appealing hands-on activities encourage the children to discover how a sweet potato looks, feels, smells, and tastes. The children make a pretend sweet potato hill to learn how this vegetable is grown, harvested, and shipped to farmers’ markets and stores. Children have many opportunities to taste sweet potatoes plain and in salads, side dishes, and cookies. Families share in the sweet rewards through the activities and recipes of the Growing at Home materials.

Cantaloupe Corner is home to vine ripened, sweet juicy cantaloupe. Tasty Acres Farm grows the best
cantaloupe activities for a country mile. Children learn about cantaloupe through hands-on activities.
They experience how a cantaloupe looks, feels, tastes, and smells. Cantaloupe Corner connects the
cantaloupes grown on the farm to the fruit in the store or farmers’ market. The children can’t resist
the cantaloupe tasting activities from plain wedges to soup to salad. Growing at Home materials create
review options for the daily Cantaloupe Corner activities.

Red, ripe, sweet, juicy strawberries are sure to delight young children. Youngsters learn about these
flavorful fruits in the Strawberry Patch at Tasty Acres Farm. Children explore and discover for themselves
how a strawberry looks, feels, tastes, and smells. After all that, who can resist a taste, or two? Children help
with hands-on growing activities. They learn strawberries come from seeds and plants before appearing
in baskets at the market. Children taste and enjoy strawberries in many different ways. Trying new foods
broadens children’s food choices. Growing at Home materials are home activities that sprout from the
day’s lessons. These recipes and activities extend the lessons for more at-home learning.

Hands-on learning experiences and inquiry-based exploration from Kids Gardening

Kids Gardening curriculum tested by educators, parents, and kids across the country.

Digging Into Soil curriculum is targeted for grades 9-12 and paired with high school Next Generation Science Standards. Lessons are engaging with activities, projects, and worksheets aimed at preserving and improving soil conditions.

Students can complete the Time for Strawberries worksheet to learn about the life cycle of strawberries.

Learning tools for educators for students of all ages, such as starting a school garden program, raised beds 101, and plants for pre-k gardens.

Try these fun and engaging at-home gardening ideas that kids will love!

Fun garden ideas for families or informal groups, such as leaf pigment experiments, garden games, and soil art.

Recursos de jardinería para niños en español.

Fund your next youth garden project with a grant from KidsGardening!

We help kids play, learn, and grow through gardening
KidsGardening supports the educators and caregivers bringing the life-changing benefits of gardening to kids.

We support educators and families with grant funding, original educational resources, inspiration, and community to get more kids learning through the garden. Examples being, lesson plans, activites, grants and community.

Play, learn, and grow through the garden with our original educational resources.

As you design and your garden program and layout, consider these elements to ensure you meet the needs of your community.

In-depth advice from site selection to harvesting, including all the steps in between, plus fun facts about each plant.

Grow your green thumb with these helpful tips.

Design, grow, and maintain an edible school garden as a dynamic teaching space! Download the FREE Seeds of Success Toolkit in its entirety or just the chapters that are relevant to your garden.