The beginner's guide: flowers to grow with your children

Growing veggies with children is great but without flowers it's boring and a bit pointless as flowers not only brighten up the place but attract beneficial bugs.

Here's what we've been planting. It's by no means an exhaustive list but is what my children love and what we find easy to grow:

• Nasturtiums. These are so easy and would look great in the comic plant pots or in a salad. You can get some lovely varieties with verigated leaves. A word of warning though - they self seed with abandon so if you'd rather not have them randomly popping up on your veggie patch grow them in pots and place around the edge.

• Poached egg plants: A great one for attracting beneficial bugs, they are easy to grow. We just sow them around the edge of our raised beds and they seem to take off. Thin them and replant these elsewhere in your garden.

• Sunflowers: An obvious one but they never fail to delight. This year we're growing four varieties - giant, velvet queen (red ones), teddy bear and ginger nut (my favourite). You can cut the heads down once they've set seed and save them to put out for the birds in the winter.

• Calendula: These are great for the veggie patch (last year I planted them alongside my beans and in with my tomatoes), I think they look much nicer than French marigolds and are easy to grow. Collecting the seed in the autumn is simple too.

• Sweet peas: Ah, what's not to love? If you didn't sow seeds earlier in the year not to worry because garden centres are full these plants at a reasonable price. Grow them up a cane or willow teepee, or amongst your  runner beans. They are grow prodigiously so you won't mind your little ones picking them. A favourite of my three-year-old boy.

• Chocolate scented cosmos: If your child has their own patch to grow things, this one's a must. It has gorgeous, velevety brown petals and the hotter it gets, the stronger the chocolate scent. I only started growing it last year but it is a perennial so I'm hoping ours will come back to life.

You don't have to grow things from seed or just to help any veggies you have in the ground. Sometimes I just let my children wander around a garden centre, encouraging them to each choose a plant to bring home. Violas and primulas seem to be popular.

A word of warning though -- morning glory is a wonderful climber producing blue, white, pink or purple flowers which usually open in the morning and die off by the afternoon but the seeds are hallucinogenic so children need close supervision if sowing these.

Get sowing or planting now with your children and your garden will be a blaze of colour come the summer.

Photo copyright: Debbie Webber