If the veggies taste good, kids will want to eat them. Grow these vegetables for kids and you’ll hardly be able to keep them away from the garden.
The first year we began gardening, my daughters were aged 3 and 5. Gardening was a new experience for all of us and they were just as excited as I was to grow all kinds of things.
We had a great time learning together what parts of plants were edible (eating nasturtium flowers for the first time really blew their minds) and what also tasted the most delicious (nasturtium flowers unfortunately did not make the cut)!
The Vegetables My Kids Like to Eat
There have been many vegetables and herbs that my kids have enjoyed eating fresh out of the garden.
My oldest daughter really enjoys cucumbers, green beans, cherry tomatoes, cucamelons, carrots, sugar snap peas, and sweet peppers.
My youngest loves to snack on broccoli, sugar snap peas, Sun Gold tomatoes, ground cherries, carrots, green beans, small sweet peppers, basil, stevia, kale, dill, and sometimes asparagus.
It is such a good feeling to see your kids gobbling down veggies that you grew yourself in your garden. It makes me so happy in the summer to see them run to get their shoes and yell, “Wait for me!” when they see me walking out to the backyard with a harvest basket.
As a mom, feeding my family is one of my top priorities, and I always want them to have the very best quality and best tasting food I can provide.
It’s one of the reasons I started a vegetable garden with my husband.
In this post, I’m sharing my kids’ favorite vegetable varieties of all time. These are the ones I have to grow double of or they will hardly ever make it into the house.
10 Best Vegetable Varieties to Grow for Kids’ Gardens
There are tons of different kinds of vegetables out there, and it can be overwhelming looking at all the seed packet descriptions and choices.
Of course you can narrow things down by looking at just the types of vegetables you already enjoy eating. But tomatoes alone come in hundreds, if not thousands of varieties.
I, too, get a little dizzy flipping through seed catalogues and staring at seed displays at the nursery. Thankfully, I have a few tried and true varieties to start every year and everything else is just a bonus.
If you are growing vegetables for your family and you have kids, why not try some of these specific vegetable varieties that our family has grown and loved?
I will include the links to seeds for these specific varieties so you can look at the growing requirements for yourself.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. This means that if you buy through my links, I could earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. I only discuss products that I love and think you’ll love, too. I’m glad you’re here and thanks for reading!
1. Sun Gold Cherry Tomatoes
These are our favorite cherry tomatoes (the orange ones). They are sweet with just a bit of acid to keep the flavor bright.
The very best crop of the season is in July when the plants are young, the sun is hot, and the weather has been dry to concentrate the tomato flavor. This is when they are at their sweetest and most flavorful.
Our first year growing these tomatoes (actually just cherry tomatoes in general, but now the kids prefer these above any others) I wasn’t able to bring in enough harvest to make sauce or dehydrate because the kids had eaten so many of them straight off the vine. It was only after they were away at school or preschool that I was able to get to the tomatoes before they could eat them.
2. Sugar Magnolia Snap Peas
Sugar snap peas and sweet snow peas are our favorite spring and fall crops, and this variety is my personal favorite because the pods are purple and it has extra curly tendrils.
Sugar Magnolia is a beautiful snap pea variety. It’s vines do get quite tall, so make sure to support these with a trellis.
We all love snacking on sugar snap peas in the spring, and I will often run out early in the morning to pick a few handfuls to tuck into the kids’ lunches for school.
It’s currently winter as I’m writing this, and I cannot wait to grow these sugar snap peas again.
A few other varieties we like to grow include: Sugar Daddy, Super Sugar Snap, and Oregon Sugar Pod (snow peas).
3. Silver Slicer Cucumbers
We have grown a few different kinds of cucumbers, but once we tried these, all four of us were hooked.
Silver Slicers have thin skin and seem to always be sweet and juicy no matter what size they are. Harvesting cucumbers at the right time can be tricky. If you wait too long, the skins will be tough, the insides will be dry and seedy, and the flesh will taste bitter.
We haven’t had that problem with Silver Slicer cucumbers. On the rare occasion one gets missed, the large, fat cucumbers still taste sweet and are juicy, although the seeds will be a little plumper than usual.
Definitely grow these for kids’ snacks!
4. Dragon Tongue Bush Beans
My kids also enjoy eating string beans, or green beans, straight out of the garden. They each have slightly different preferences as to their favorite bean, but Dragon Tongue beans are a favorite of both.
I love the look of Dragon Tongue beans, and I also like how large and flattened the pods are.
These are a bush bean, so there’s no need to stake or trellis them. And they are also stringless.
To be honest, most of the varieties we grow have very similar flavors, and I think the reason each kid has a different preference is because of the color of the bean. My youngest, for instance, loves Golden Wax beans because they are yellow and yellow is her favorite color.
When she was three, my husband and I once went in to check on her before heading to bed ourselves, and we found green bean tops strewn all over her floor, along with an empty bowl that had earlier that evening been full of fresh-picked pods.
We had no idea she had snuck out of bed sometime after we’d tucked her in and brought the bowl of green beans to her room.
If that doesn’t sell you on growing string beans for kids’ gardens, I don’t know what will!
5. Lunchbox Snack Pepper
I feel like I’m cheating a little bit adding this to the list because I have not grown these myself, however, I just ordered some to try for my own garden!
The kids love snacking on little sweet peppers and Lunchbox is a sweet type that is prolific and easy to grow.
Peppers, for us, take a little bit of time to get going, but the smaller peppers are always the first to produce and usually the most prolific. I think these snacking peppers will be well worth the wait.
I’m excited to harvest our own little Lunchbox peppers this coming season.
6. Cucamelons (Mexican Sour Gherkin)
This is another mini vegetable that is absolutely adorable and enticing to get kids to try. I will admit that cucamelons are not my favorite garden vegetable to snack on, however, they are good enough to eat and my kids like them, so I will continue to grow them for as along as they ask me to.
Cucamelons look like little watermelons but taste like slightly sour cucumbers. They are in the same plant family as cucumbers (both are cucurbits), but are in a different genus—Melothria scabra.
These little cucumelons are very prolific and have wild vines that are great for covering a trellis. They will also volunteer like crazy if you leave the fruit on the ground, so plant wisely!
7. Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry
Ground cherries are yet another little vegetable (are you seeing a theme here?) that has somewhat mixed reviews in our family. My youngest says she loves these, and I like them, too, but the other two in the family do not like them.
I grew them mostly to try to make jam or pie, but was unable to harvest enough ground cherries to do either! The plants were definitely prolific, but the fruits were too fun to eat fresh.
Ground cherries are sweet and Aunt Molly’s ground cherry to me, has notes of vanilla, pineapple, and tomato. I know that’s a very odd combination, and that’s probably why our family is split on whether or not we like this one!
I like that they grow in these papery little husks like a wrapper for the fruit.
Our whole family may not be united behind our love of the ground cherry, but maybe your family will end up loving these! There have to be other ground cherry people out there or this variety would’ve died out years ago.
8. Waltham 29 Broccoli
Yes, just your average, standard broccoli is included on this list of vegetables to grow for kids. No, it’s not a cute mini vegetable, nor it doesn’t come in a fun color (although there are purple broccoli varieties you can grow from seed).
But if you’ve never grown broccoli yourself, you’ll be shocked to discover that homegrown, fresh-picked broccoli is a far cry from the dry, woody store-bought kinds usually available for us to buy.
Garden-fresh broccoli is sweet, succulent, and just delicious.
No wonder my youngest likes to chomp on these florets straight off the plant. Sometimes she doesn’t even use her hands. Just bites it right off.
She does the same with kale in the springtime as well. Is it possible that she’s part rabbit?
9. Rainbow Carrots
Carrots are a kids’ garden must-have, and of course, you must grow all the colors!
I recommend getting a pack of mixed carrot colors, which are different colored carrot varieties mixed together: red, orange, yellow, white, and purple. These multi-packs are fun to harvest, as you won’t know what colors are going to come out of the ground!
We’ve also grown specific varieties for their beautiful colors, so here are a few other carrot varieties that I like: Atomic Red, Cosmic Purple, Black Nebula.
10. Potatoes
Nearly all of the vegetables on this list are snackable and easy to eat straight out of the garden, but potatoes are a bit different.
I’m including them on this list for kids’ gardens because they are just so fun to grow.
My kids love potato harvest time, and of course, once the potatoes are boiled, mashed, or roasted, they also love eating our homegrown potatoes.
One of the easiest ways to grow potatoes with kids is to plant them in fabric planter pots filled with potting mix. Once the potato plants have grown and begun to yellow and wither on top, they are ready to harvest.
We typically dump the whole pot out in our garden wagon and then sift through the soil with our hands to pull out the potato treasures.
I always grow a mix of red, white, and blue potatoes and these typically are ready by the Fourth of July. Perfect for our Independence Day celebrations. I get my potatoes in person at our local nurseries. I’m not too picky about specific varieties, but these are ones that I’ve tried that are usually available every year.
- Red Potatoes: Red Pontiac, Red Norland
- White Potatoes: Kennebec, German Butterball
- Blue Potatoes: Adirondack Blue, Magic Molly
Bonus Edible Plants That Kids Will Love
There are a few non-vegetable plants that I just had to mention.
Of course you can grow strawberries, blueberries, watermelon, and any kind of fruit, and kids will love to eat them. We would like to double the amount of fruit we grow next year!
But do not miss out on these herbs as well.
- Stevia (a bit difficult to start from seed, but so sweet and delicious)
- Everleaf Emerald Towers Basil (my kids love homemade pesto and this variety produces more leaves than flowers)
- Dill (chop and add to plain yogurt to make an easy veggie dip; my youngest also chomps on this fresh)
- Chocolate Mint (try making this into hot or iced tea)
- Apple Mint (same as above)
- Mongolian Giant Sunflowers (fun to see huge flowers and the seeds can be roasted and eaten)
Growing Vegetables for Kids and With Kids
One thing I’ve learned from gardening with my kids and trying to get them to eat different foods at mealtimes, is that if I’m excited about it, there’s a good chance they’ll get excited about it, too.
I have no doubt that seeing the delight on my face when those first seedlings began to sprout or listening to me enthuse about the different plants I’m growing had some effect on their willingness to try eating the vegetables we grow.
I’ve tried to always keep gardening fun and allow them to be involved in both the fun and less fun parts as much as they want to be because I want to sow the seeds of (see what I did there?) desire to garden themselves when they grow older.
Do you garden with kids? I would love to hear about your favorite vegetables to grow and eat and please share any tips you have for gardening with kids.
I hope this list has inspired you to try some new vegetable varieties in your garden.
Happy Gardening!