These days, home is the place to be! Which is why this summer we are focusing our Home Improvements on the outdoor spaces of our Home. You can find us making weekly trips to our local Home Hardware store to pick up supplies. I have always had a big appreciation for Gardening, which was passed down to me by my mother, an avid gardener. We always say “At the end of the day in Summer, you should smell like dirt”. Here are 3 ways I’ve noticed I can pass this Love of Gardening onto my own Daughter, Charlotte.

1. Let them be a part of the process: Charlotte likes to pick out flowers at the Garden Centre at Home Hardware and she always goes for the tropical looking variety; which helps make our Garden feel like a vacation getaway! Great job Charlotte! She also loves to arrange where certain flowers will be placed in the garden beds and I have to admit she’s better at this than I am, she likes to group alike flowers together whereas I used to spread them out, her method is actually more visible from the road!
2. Name the flowers and plants: This is a tradition my Mom and I started years ago when we found a huge perennial in our backyard garden that we couldn’t figure out the proper name of (it actually turned out to be a beautiful purple flowering weed! Lol!) We named her “Sarafina” and she came back every year. Now, Charlotte likes to pick out fun names for the different varieties of flowers. She named our matching white and pink Dipladenias “Moscha & Poscha” because they are “twin sisters”. Haha!
3. Give the responsibility for watering and weeding: Name me a kid who doesn’t LOVE to spray with the hose! We always encourage Charlotte to do the watering in the gardens in the evenings, and she loves to take on the task. She understands photosynthesis and how plants use water and sunlight to grow. Spraying the gardens down with the mister spray setting, or the light spray setting with our Gardena Hose Nozzle (from Home Hardware – Click Here) This Hose nozzle has 7 adjustable settings and after trying out many designs, this one is our favourite! Charlotte enjoys the aftercare process just as much as the initial planting, with weeding and watering the fun of gardening is a summer long journey that encourages our four year old to enjoy the outdoors every day. Playing in the gardens is big at this house too, catch our earlier article about Fairy Gardens and making Stick Fairies out of ‘found’ materials in nature.

Living in Canada, we enjoy the summer months and the fresh air of being outside as much as possible from May to September. With Home being the place to be this Summer – we can’t get enough of the Garden and Landscape game! Our goal is to create an outdoor space that feels like a weekend getaway, right here at Home! Follow along our outdoor space journey on Instagram here —> https://www.instagram.com/mccarney.party.of.five/

Xo – The McCarneys