This adorable idea from Highlights is one of those times when it’s perfectly okay to let the kids play with their food.

Just before Travis got home from school, I prepped a big platter of veggies and fruits that could be used to make a veggie “garden”. This can include almost anything, but we used an assortment of:

Celery

Snap peas

Cherry tomatoes

Baby carrots

Green beans

Broccoli

Green apple

Blueberries

I set out the plate, along with a cutting board for a “canvas”, and invited Travis to form the items into flowers.

There was so much room for variety here! The long green shapes like celery and green beans were perfect for flower stems. The slightly shorter snap peas could be grass.

Rounder shapes (cherry tomatoes, blueberries) worked nicely as the center of flowers, and we played around with ideas for petals, such as baby carrots or fuzzy broccoli trees.

This “flower” with a cluster of blueberries made me think of delphiniums!

Be careful though, because you’ll probably have garden “pests” who gobble up the flowers only moments after they’ve bloomed.