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With it being bank holiday weekend I was really looking forward to getting outdoors with the kids. But the weather report? Ugh. Typical British bank holiday. With my youngest a bit poorly I didn’t want to risk her getting worse so I needed to plan something fun for indoors, I didn’t want the weather to ruin our plans for green fingered fun though so between me and my son we came up with this plan to make some plant pots out of toys, don’t they look fun?! We were inspired after looking though Crops In Pots that I picked up last week in Waterstones and so not only are these planters fun, but they’re also a cool little way to get your kids involved in growing crops too!
Like a lot of parents I want to get my kids involved in gardening and natural living. I have a lot of good intentions but living in a really densely populated area my plans for wild living on a small holding are pretty unlikely. Collective Bias asked me if I’d like to take a trip to my local bookstore and buy something to encourage my plans and I was more than happy to do so. I used to run my own book business and owned 10k books at home and in garages, but these days I own two books? Maybe three? I found Crops In Pots in the Gardening section of Waterstones and thought it looked perfect for those of us who aren’t going to get an allotment any time soon.
How to make your upcycled toy herb planter
As well as my copy of Crops in Pots for Inspiration, I bought some thyme, a couple of cheap animal toys (check for the ones that feel hollow inside) and used a knife and a pair of scissors.
To make the hole in the animals back, I started by sawing with the knife and once it was big enough cut the rest using the scissors, this is way quicker than sawing. To make your planter more drainable I’d recommend putting drainage holes in the bottom if you can and starting with some small pebbles before you add the soil. This would work really well with succulents as they don’t demand much water but we really wanted to do some crops!
Add your herbs into the gap in your animal. I must admit here that one of my favourite bits of creating this was walking round a garden centre thinking ‘what could I plant in a tiger?!’ and wondering what my parents would think. Times like that I really love my job!
My son took this picture of all filling the animals, my assistants for this job were my five year old son and my two year old daughter. They both really enjoyed it, getting kids to garden and grow is such a great thing to do and using animal toys made them both laugh. I also managed to keep calm when my son put his soil covered hands all over my DSLR to take the photo which is proof to me that growing things, no matter how small, really is good for your psyche.
And with that they were done! Our little herb planters are currently in our kitchen, cheering up the room until we can go outside and get started on larger containers.
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Chantal Kirkland
This is absolutely adorable! I can’t wait to make my own!
Jen
I Adore these and now qNT TO MAKE SOME, BUT i WOULD NEED FAKE PLANTS AS i WILL KILL THEM – Shoot, I just realised that I had caps lock on – sorry!
Fiona Cambouropoulos
What a brilliant idea. Much more fun to have herbs in a toy than a boring old pot. I bet you could raid a charity shop for the toys for next to nothing too for a great upcycled project.
Jess @ Catch A Single Thought
What a brilliant idea! Both my kids love gardening but I’m a bit hopeless at it, maybe something to try with a succulent or something less easy to kill!
Anne
They look fantastic, we have some of those hollow plastic animals, I wonder if my kids would be happy to use them as planters as they no longer play with them any more. I love growing my own herbs, the Little Man helped me to create a herb garden last year but our garden is useless for growing things in.
Emma T
I’m so rubbish at growing things, but these look great fun. A brilliant way to get kids involved in gardening.