Make a frog habitat garden to help kids learn about frogs and their natural environment. This is a fun small world which invites imaginative play and also teaches kids about caring for our wildlife.

I’m not very well known for my gardening prowess. Although I’ve tried hard over the years to create a pretty potted garden with veggies, herbs and flowers my efforts have not been very successful so far. This doesn’t mean I can’t keep trying (note my growth mindset here). It also means I’m left with a large collection of pots with dirt and nothing else in them, save a few weeds or random baby trees which have sprouted out of nowhere.

Ever since we made small world fairy gardens a few years ago my daughter has been asking for a “frog garden”. I decided to repurpose one of our dead veggie gardens into a frog habitat garden for her.

For plants I’ve used aloe vera because even I can’t kill that one. We’ve had the same pot of aloe vera thriving on neglect in our back garden for YEARS. It’s sprouted lots of little off-shoots everywhere so it was easy to grab a few with root systems and use them for our frog habitat.

The pot (originally a faux-antique metal wash basin with holes drilled in the bottom) was a perfect size for a small world. I didn’t even need to add dirt.

How to make a frog habitat garden

You will need:

• A large pot filled with dirt
• Rocks of various sizes
• A pot drip tray (ours is from a plastic terra-cotta look flower pot)
• Plants – I’ve used aloe vera off shoots taken from another pot
• Moss – I dug our moss up out of the dirt in our back yard
• Plastic frogs and (optional) insects

How to:

1. Make sure the dirt in the pot is moist and not too dry. I gave the pot a good water before making the garden.
2. Dig a small depression in the centre of the pot for the drip tray and place it there. This is the pond.
3. Add rocks around the pond, and also randomly around the garden. Place a large rock in the centre of the pond.
4. Plant the plants you have selected around the garden.
5. Add a few pieces of moss around the garden.
6. Fill pond with water.
7. Add plastic frogs.

Frogs will of course need something to eat, so we have added a few plastic insects too.

This would be a fabulous gardening project for kids to make themselves or help to make. They can look after their frog garden by remembering to water it regularly and spraying the moss with a water sprayer so it won’t dry out and die.

Who knows, maybe some real frogs will even come to visit one day.

You might also like:

• Make a frog on a lily pad paper craft
• Set up a tadpole to frog observation tank
• Make a small world fairy garden
• Make a camping small world for the train tracks (inspired by the book Old Tracks New Tricks)
• Make a dinosaur small world in a suitcase

Also visit our Small Worlds board on Pinterest for lots of other creative and imaginative small world ideas.

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