Potty plants

Add to My Folder

By Beverley Michael — early years teacher and writer

Brighten up your setting with these fantastic ideas for growing plants and flowers in all sorts of colourful containers

Toytown in bloom

Ask the children to help sort out any outgrown or broken toys that could be used as a suitable container to hold plants, for example, dumper trucks, lorries, trains, boats, sand buckets, wagons, helmets, wheelbarrows, prams, drums or old footballs. Make drainage holes in the bottom of the toys if they do not already have any.

Invite the children to fill the toys with compost, then help them to carefully remove small colourful plants, such as ‘happy’ pansies, violas, heartsease, daisies, auriculas, fuchsias or lobelia, from their plastic pots and place them in the toys. As the children plant, encourage them to talk about how they used to play with that particular toy. Place the toys either indoors or outdoors and water regularly. (Winter pansies will bloom outdoors throughout the winter.)