Review: Seedling Junior Gardening Kits

Seedling was created with a view to encouraging children to learn through seeing, doing, exploring and discovering the world around them in a hands-on manner.

All children love to create and make and in doing so it encourages them not only to practice new-found skills but to learn whilst they’re having fun.

The Seedling range is designed and created in New Zealand and is a welcome change from the electrical, buzzy, noisy toys which have found their way into our homes.  Instead this collection encourages children to develop and use traditional skills from sewing to painting, from puzzles to experiments allowing them to explore, create and imagine to their hearts content.

We tried out the Junior Gardening Kit which is a perfect starter set for a budding (no pun intended) gardener.  The kit comes packaged in recycled and recyclable cardboard packaging and each one has been put together by hand.

The Junior Gardening Kit contains a vasi terracotta pot, a pair of children’s cotton gardening gloves, three gardening tools and planter sticks.  The gloves would fit a child up to the age of around seven or eight or so.  The tools are a good size for children to comfortably hold and use so much more suitable for them than adult-sized versions.  It doesn’t include any seeds or compost but that isn’t a big issue at all.  The pot is fairly thick and sturdy and a good size for planting seeds in, avoiding the need for growing plants to be re-potted too soon after growing.

My children are already helpful and eager gardeners who normally love the soil between their fingers and don’t mind getting muddy.  It was nice to be able to encourage them to wear the gloves, although not much encouragement was needed as they were too busy arguing over whose turn it was to wear them.  We chose to plant an apple seed using our set and we had daily trips running back and forth, sometimes several times a day, to see if anything had grown yet.

Mike and I are strong advocates of teaching our children traditional, basic skills.  We feel that skills like cooking, sewing, carpentry and of course gardening and growing food will be invaluable to them when grown.  It is also great to see children step away from consoles and the  ’electronic world’ around them to the old fashioned play and learning which seems to be becoming sadly forgotten in today’s techie age.

Looking through the Seedling website I was smitten with the various activities children could try out, knowing that my children would have a tough time choosing between the products in the range.  The Junior Gardening Kit (rrp: £14.50) is available from all good sellers including Amazon but you can also check out the rest of the range on the Seedling website at www.seedling.co.nz.