SNEAK PEEK: Little sprouts soiree • Honeybee birthday
party • National Leave-a-Zucchini-on-Your-Neighbor’s-Porch
Day • Garden party favors • and more
Yards and gardens make great party settings, even for Alaskan pirates.
Celebrating the fruits of our labor is a common joy shared by families that garden. Garden fairy parties, flashlight garden scavenger hunt sleepovers, and honeybee-themed birthdays are all examples of ways families weave the garden into their events and parties.
Holidays and birthdays are on an annual cycle that helps shape family traditions and celebrations. The garden works the same way. If we look at the cycle of a garden and the seasons that drive that cycle, there are more reasons to celebrate than we could likely fit into our lives. From pulling well-kept carrots from under the snow for Thanksgiving in Alaska, to canning dilly beans in the middle of the summer to give to Grandma, many of the families we spoke with mentioned traditions tied to the garden that focus on reaping the harvest.
Making pie, sauce, and cider, and having bobbing contests are all great ways to celebrate the apple harvest. Whether you have your own apple tree or you get apples from a u-pick orchard or farmers’ market, your family can create seasonal harvest traditions around this wonderful fruit. And apples are only an example—you can celebrate any garden crop when it is abundant. Spotting the first flowering bulb of the winter, harvesting potatoes, or roasting sweet corn are all great excuses to gather friends, eat together, and celebrate.
The list of what families do together to celebrate their harvests could fill its own book. Here are some brilliant examples of seasonal party theme ideas that family gardeners shared with us.
Firefly Campfire
Prepare a nighttime flashlight-led scavenger hunt around the garden, and then gather around a fire pit for roasted corn.
Bug Party
Make insect collecting nets and use bug boxes to collect bugs. Have a bug race. If you dare, serve chocolate covered insects.
Water Party
Paint metal watering cans, set up a slip and slide or sprinklers to play in, and have a water balloon toss.
Community Jam
Canning and jamming are not quick and easy tasks, which is all the more reason to include the whole family or neighborhood. Have the little ones harvest and wash produce and older kids can help slice and can.
Floral Fiesta
Make floral wreaths and other crafts, such as mini dried bouquets and dried pepper ristras.
Seed Social
Collect seeds for saving, roast sunflower seeds, pop popcorn, make seed mosaics.
Harvest Festival
Make cornhusk dolls, eat a garden bounty meal, make a stone soup, carve pumpkins and roast their seeds, make apple pie and press cider.
Garden Stones
Make stepping stones, paint stone plant markers, and make hypertufa planter pots.
Bird Connections
Make birdseed wreaths, homemade bird feeders, suet cakes; collect nest building materials to set out in an onion bag for birds to collect; go bird watching; set up a bird blind.
Salad Party
Harvest a salad from your garden, or have friends bring ingredients to make a potluck salad. At the party, sow lettuce seeds in paper pots.
Little Sprouts Soiree
Host a seed-sowing party. Make root-view cups for planting, and serve sprouted greens, nuts, and other seedy snacks in little cups.
Wild Greens Party
Harvest wild greens, like miner’s lettuce, to make a salad, and dandelion greens to make tea.
Tracy was busy as a bee preparing for this honeybee-themed party.
Garden-themed parties are limited only by your imagination. At Raine’s 5th birthday party, her mother, Tracy, set up a project where kids bundled up 8-inch pieces of bamboo with rubber bands to make solitary beehives. Tracy had little instruction labels on how to install their hives at home and the kids used rubber stamps to decorate them. Other activities included tasting honey, pollen, and honey in the comb. In addition to mini bee homes, they also took home honey sticks, bee stickers, and honey taffy as party favors. The bee-themed garden party was capped off with a beehive cake. Tracy had another garden-themed party for her son’s 4th birthday. Kids went home with 5-inch terra-cotta pots with baby ball carrots growing in them and bug boxes with live lady bugs inside.
Seed mosaics are fun for partygoers of all ages.
For Neli’s garden birthday, we set up stations for partygoers. Flowers were snipped and strung on strings to make flower “bling” (necklaces). Popcorn grown the prior year was out for kids to pick off the cob and air pop. A seed-sowing station with sunflower seeds and empty planter pots served as do-it-yourself party favors. And the favorite of all activities was the mud sculpture station where kids mixed soil and water in buckets and then sculpted art on cardboard pallets. The day ended with fresh peach pie and hand-cranked ice cream.
At Greta’s birthday celebration, which took place on a chilly, fog-covered morning, partygoers created crafts to take home, such as lavender sachets and seed mosaics. Clippers, hot water, and mugs were available for harvesting herbal tea from the garden, and a fir pit was lit to keep folks warm. Chickens were fed and pet, and the mulberry tree was picked over. Garden veggie snacks, such as sweet pepper slices and apples, were followed by a cake dusted with powdered sugar flower imprints.
National Leave-a-Zucchini-on-YouR-NeigHboR’S-PoRcH Day
WHY NOT MAKE up your own national garden holidays? This zucchini day idea was shared by a friend of ours who had the urge to anonymously distribute her overabundance of summer squash. A related idea was shared by another family that hosts a How Many Ways Can You Cook a Zucchini? party where friends bring summer squash dishes. If only we could get these creative minds together, we might start a zucchini revolution.
Water play is even more fun at a birthday party. • A group of gamesters twist it up playing human knot.
Most kids’ birthdays include an invitation, games or activities, food, and party favors. The garden can be incorporated into some or all of these aspects of a party, regardless of the time of year. Here are some ideas for every step, from planning to party day.
If you plan to send out invitations, infuse them with a garden motif. Make or purchase paper with embedded seeds for a plantable announcement. Seed packets made from coin envelopes, or envelopes you fold yourself, can carry the party details on the outside with something to sow on the inside.
Create a craft project that is fun, educational, and gives the kids a sense of ownership, such as painting pots and planting succulent cuttings in them. You can find a list of activities we suggest for parties—even if it happens to be cold or rainy that day—at the back of this book.
Edible projects engage partygoers, and feed them too.
Even without introducing a game to play, kids left out in a yard usually come up with one of their own. Three-legged, potato sack, and wheelbarrow races are classic outdoor games. Other classics include limbo, jump rope, and water balloon tossing. Water games are especially fun in a summer garden, and just turning on the sprinklers can make for many smiles. Water relays, where kids pass a cup of water above their head to fill a bucket on the end of a line allows kids to play with water without getting quite as drenched as they will under sprinklers.
Tail tag is one of our favorites. Each kid has a tail made from a piece of cloth stuck in the back of his or her waistband. While the kids are in a defined area marked off by a garden hose or long rope, they try to pull out each other’s tails. If they lose their tail, they go to the outside of the boundary and try to pull tails from the outside. The last person with an intact tail wins.
Most kids know how to play freeze tag. If you are tagged, you have to freeze with your feet spread wide. Players that are frozen can be freed to run if another player crawls under their legs. It is semi-organized chaos, but kids like it. Elbow tag and sharks and minnows are fun as well, and get young bodies moving. If you don’t know how to play those, just ask a kid.
Garden-themed take-home gifts are plentiful, and always appreciated. Bug boxes, little hand tools, hand lenses, seeds, and baby plants all come to mind. We hope we’ve also given you plenty of ideas in this book for activities in which kids make things they can take home, like milk carton birdhouses, planet-friendly paper pots, leaf press candles, or rock plant labels.
Have you ever eaten a compost cake? Layers of crumbled cookies and ice cream are sprinkled with caramel, and gummi worms climb out the sides. Foods that kids help make are also very popular. Hand-pressed tortillas are a great addition to a taco or quesadilla bar. Top-your-own mini garden pizzas, where kids pick and prep their own toppings, are always well received. And, of course, we hope this book has given you lots of recipe ideas that are easy to incorporate into party plans.
