Sunday 17 October 2021 is Garden Day – a chance for people across South Africa to celebrate their green spaces – no matter how big or small. Garden Day is also the ideal opportunity to clear your schedule and spend the day making memories in the garden with your little ones.
Spend the day outdoors with your children enjoying these garden-inspired craft projects that will keep them busy, while connecting with nature on the cusp of summer:
Make a bonnet with blooms
Help your kids make colourful bonnets with flowers perfect for a spring celebration. Let them find and pick their favourite flowers, help them play around and plan a design, and see them beam with pride when they put on their own creations.
You’ll need:
- summer hat with a wide brim
- a length of wide ribbon in any colour
- florist wire, raffia, or twine
- fresh flowers from your garden
Steps:
- Cut a variety of your favourite flowers, herbs, and twigs in different colours and sizes from your garden. Remember to leave a longer stem. Help your children handle the secateurs, they are very sharp!
- Play around with the flowers and greenery by making small bunches and arranging them in a row to find a design they like.
- Cut some stems shorter and leave others long to give the spring bonnet a whimsical look.
- Tie your flowers onto the ribbon with florist wire, raffia, or twine.
- Tie the ribbon with your flower design around an old summer hat with a wide brim to create a beautiful spring bonnet ideal for a Garden party.
Create a flowery butterfly
Go on a treasure hunt around the garden to collect flowers in all shapes, sizes, and colours for this Garden Day-inspired butterfly project. Keep your little ones busy collecting, cutting, drawing, and sticking to create a beautiful work of art in celebration of spring.
You’ll need:
- cardboard offcuts
- white paper and a marker or a printout of a butterfly
- a stick of glue
- flowers and twigs from the garden
- child-friendly scissors
- an assortment of bowls or containers
- a butterfly or bug outline, which you can download here
Steps:
- Collect flowers in all colours and sizes from the garden. Download Candide, a garden community app, to help the kids identify the different names of the flowers they collect. Candide is free for download in the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.
- Help your children cut the petals into various bowls. They will use the petals to decorate the butterfly wings.
- Use the blank paper and black marker and help your child draw the outline of a butterfly. Or find one online and print it out.
- Stick the paper onto a large enough cardboard offcut as a base.
- Help your children choose and stick the petals to decorate the wings in their own unique style.
- Use any left-over pieces of cardboard and create more flower patterns.
Celebrate In Style on Sunday 17 October
There are many ways in which you can enjoy Garden Day. A picnic on the lawn will bring you into direct contact with the earth and allow you much-needed grounding, plus the benefits of vitamin D (hello sunshine!) are known to include fighting off depression and boosting mood. No space? No problem – set a stylish table. Use teapots and plenty of gorgeous, garden-fresh flowers to create a visually striking tea party instead. Or bring your garden to your kitchen by adding home-grown herbs to a delicious salad, decorating a cake with petals or concocting a botanical cocktail.
If you need some bright ideas and green-fingered inspiration, Gardenday.co.za has a handy toolkit to help you plan a gorgeous, nature-filled celebration, including recipe ideas, downloadable invitations and crafty things to make and do with children in the garden. Catch news, updates and inspiration at @GardenDaySA on Candide, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Follow us @GardenDaySA #GardenDaySA and share your nature-filled celebrations and your garden’s goodness by tagging us in your posts.
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