Every year the same question. What do you get a dad who says he doesn’t need anything? Who has enough ties, enough socks, enough aftershave to last until the children leave home?
Here’s a different answer: give him something to do with the children. Not a voucher for an activity centre. Not a board game that will be lost under the sofa by August. Something that lives on the windowsill or in the garden, that gets checked every morning, that turns into a pizza in July or a harvest of herbs in September. Something that connects a dad and a child to the natural world together.
That’s the idea behind every gift in this guide. Whether the dad in your life is an enthusiastic gardener or someone who has never grown anything in their life, these gifts create shared experiences rather than stuff. They work with or without a garden. They’re genuinely fun for children to give and genuinely used by the adults who receive them.
The best Father’s Day gift isn’t the most expensive one. It’s the one that creates a reason to be outside together on a Saturday morning with your hands in the soil.
Nature and growing gifts for Father's Day
Every gift below is chosen because it works for both angles: dads who garden and dads who’ve never gardened before. Each one creates an activity to do together, and each one can be wrapped beautifully and presented by small hands with enormous pride.
1. 🍕 Grow Your Own Pizza Toppings Kit
★ Best gift for dads and kids together • Perfect for families with children aged 5–9
This is the Father’s Day gift that becomes a summer project. Grow your own tomatoes, basil and peppers together, then make the pizza together when the harvest comes in.
The growing takes 8–12 weeks, which means a kit given on Father’s Day in June becomes a pizza night in late August or September. The dad tends the plants. The children water and check and declare daily updates on tomato progress. The harvest becomes the event.
It’s also the gift for the dad who thinks he’s not a gardener. You don’t need to be a gardener to grow tomatoes on a sunny windowsill or balcony. The kit includes everything from seeds, peat free compost coins and instructions.
The pizza connection removes any sense that this is a difficult or specialist thing to do. It’s growing food you already love, for a meal you’re going to make together.
For children, giving this gift comes with a built-in promise: we’re going to make pizza with Dad when it’s ready. That anticipation is part of the present.
🌱 Little Sprouts: Our Grow Your Own Pizza Toppings Kit has everything needed to go from seed to pizza night. No garden required.
2. 🌿 Grow Your Own Herb Garden Kit
★ Best for dads who cook • Great for any age child to give and works on any windowsill
A herb garden kit is the gift for the dad who loves cooking, who always reaches for fresh herbs, who has occasionally bought a supermarket basil plant and watched it slowly die on the kitchen counter.
Growing herbs from seed is a completely different experience, slower, more satisfying and resulting in plants that actually thrive because they’re raised in the right conditions from the start.
Basil, mint, coriander and chives are the classic quartet: useful in the kitchen every week, fast enough to germinate that the children can see results within a fortnight, and genuinely satisfying to tend. The daily watering becomes a shared routine. The first harvest of tearing basil leaves into pasta, picking mint for a drink, connects the growing to the eating in a way that shop-bought herbs never can.
For children, this is also a gift they can be meaningfully involved in giving. They can help set it up on Father’s Day morning, push the seeds into the compost, and water it alongside Dad every day thereafter. The herb garden becomes a shared project rather than a gift that sits on a shelf.
🌱 Little Sprouts: Our Grow Your Own Herb Garden Kit includes seeds, peat-free compost coins and a guide. Works perfectly on a kitchen windowsill.
3. 🔨 Children’s Gardening Tool Set (To Use Together)
★ Best for dads who already garden • Ideal for children aged 3–9 who want to help in the garden
For the dad who already gardens, the gift that transforms gardening from his solo activity into something the whole family does together. A set of properly sized children’s tools from a trowel, fork and gloves that actually fit small hands. This moves a child from watching to doing.
From standing next to Dad with nothing to contribute, to having a real job: their own trowel for making holes, their own fork for turning compost, their own gloves that they put on with ceremony every time they head outside.
For dads who garden, this is genuinely practical. It’s the tool that gets used every weekend. It’s also the gift that changes the dynamic from Dad gardening while the children play on their screens, to the whole family in the garden together. Small children with real tools feel valued and capable. They stay engaged longer. The garden becomes a shared space rather than Dad’s domain.
Pair with a grow your own kit for a complete Father’s Day package: the tools to garden with and a project to start together on the day.
🌱 Little Sprouts: Safe, eco-friendly gardening tools sized for little hands. Browse trowels, forks, gloves and more.
Shop Children’s Gardening Tools →
4. 🌺 Flower Press
★ Best for nature-loving dads and kids • Works beautifully for ages 5–9
A flower press turns every walk with Dad into a foraging expedition and every forage into a creative project. Children collect flowers, leaves and grasses. Press them for two weeks. Then use the dried results to make Father’s Day cards for next year, illustrated nature journals, bookmarks or framed artwork.
This is the gift for the dad who takes the children to the park or the countryside, who points out plants on walks, who has always meant to do something with the beautiful things they find and never quite got around to it. The flower press is the structure that turns those walks into a project with a tangible, beautiful result.
It’s also one of those rare gifts where the child’s involvement is genuine rather than token. Children aged 5 and up can operate a flower press independently. They choose what to press, they arrange it, they check on it daily, they decide what to make with the results. Dad’s involvement is the walks and the wonder. The making is theirs.
🌱 Little Sprouts: Browse flower presses and nature activity tools in our children’s gardening range.
Shop Children’s Gardening Tools →
5. 📦 Little Sprouts Monthly Nature Subscription Box
★ Best ongoing gift, the one that arrives every month • For families with children aged 3–9
Give the gift that arrives every month through summer and beyond. Each Little Sprouts box contains seasonal seeds, an original Irish folklore story, hands-on nature crafts, and a growing guide, all chosen for the season and all designed to take under 10 minutes to set up. It’s the Father’s Day gift that keeps arriving long after Father’s Day is forgotten.
This works perfectly as a Father’s Day gift for two reasons. First, the box arrives addressed to the family, but the dad who opened it on Father’s Day is the one who gets to open each subsequent one with the children. It becomes associated with him, with summer, with the ritual of opening it together on a Saturday morning.
Second, it removes the planning. No sourcing seeds, no googling what to grow in August, no last minute trip to the garden centre. Everything is in the box, ready to go.
Gift one month, three months or an ongoing subscription. No garden required, everything works on a windowsill.
🌱 Little Sprouts: Gift one month, three months, or an ongoing subscription. Every box is a new growing adventure.
Explore the Little Sprouts Subscription Box →
6. 🧤 Children’s Gardening Gloves
★ Best add on gift — low budget, high impact • For children aged 3–9 who want to help Dad in the garden
The smallest gift with a surprisingly large impact. Children who have their own gardening gloves wear them every time they go near the garden, the pots or anything that vaguely resembles outdoor work. The gloves are the signal that this is their activity too. Not just watching, but doing.
On their own, gloves make a lovely, affordable Father’s Day gift from a young child who wants to give something they’ve chosen themselves. Paired with a grow your own kit or a tool set, they complete a package that covers everything needed for a summer of growing together.
Present the whole set in a simple trug or basket for a Father’s Day gift that looks considered and feels generous without requiring a large budget.
🌱 Little Sprouts: Browse children’s gardening gloves sized for little hands in our tools collection.
Shop Children’s Gardening Gloves →
Father's Day growing activities to do together on the day
The gift is the starting point. Here are six things you can actually do together on Father’s Day morning, each one takes about ten minutes and none of them require any previous gardening experience.
| Activity | What to do |
| Plant the pizza kit together | Set up the compost, make the holes together, drop in the seeds. Label each pot with the child’s handwriting. Water together. This takes 15 minutes and becomes the project that runs all summer. |
| Make a herb pot for the kitchen | A single pot of basil or mint, planted and labelled by the children, placed on the kitchen windowsill. Water it together every morning. Use the first leaves together in a meal. |
| Go on a nature walk and press flowers | Take a bag and a flower press on the walk. Collect whatever looks interesting. Press it when you get home. Check it together every few days over the following two weeks. |
| Sunflower height competition | Plant two or three sunflower seeds in pots on Father’s Day. Each person chooses one. Measure them weekly. The winner’s sunflower earns a prize (to be determined). Results arrive in August. |
| Build a bug hotel | Collect natural materials on a walk such as pine cones, hollow stems, bark, sticks, and build a simple bug hotel together using a wooden crate or box. Site it in the garden or on the balcony. Check weekly for residents. |
| Do the bean in a jar experiment | Damp cotton wool, a bean seed, a glass jar, a sunny windowsill. Watch the root emerge over the next few days together. Simple, fast, and reliably captivating for children aged 3 and up. |
How to wrap a nature gift for Father's Day
Nature gifts often look their best when they’re presented simply. A few ideas:
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A wooden trug or simple basket filled with the kit, a pair of gloves and a small handwritten card from the children. This looks beautiful and costs almost nothing extra in packaging
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Include a ‘growing promise’ card written by the child: ‘I promise to water this with you every day’ or ‘I’ll be your gardening helper all summer’, this makes the experience part of the gift, not just the kit
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For the pizza kit, add a handmade ‘pizza night voucher’. A promise from the children that when the harvest is ready, they will make the pizza with Dad from scratch
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Wrap in brown paper tied with garden twine rather than plastic wrapping. It looks considered and the twine becomes a useful item in the garden
Frequently asked questions
Do these gifts need a garden?
None of them do. Every product in this guide works on a sunny windowsill or balcony. Our full guide to gardening without a garden covers small space growing in detail, but the short answer is: a bright windowsill is all you need.
What if Dad isn't a gardener?
That’s exactly who these gifts are designed for. The grow your own kits in particular require no previous gardening knowledge, the instructions are included and the process is simple enough for children to lead. Many of the best growing experiences happen when a parent and child figure it out together for the first time. Not knowing is part of the adventure.
When should I buy a Father's Day growing gift to make sure it arrives in time?
Father’s Day falls on 21st June 2026 in Ireland, the UK, USA and Canada. Order by mid-June to be safe. If you’re in Australia or New Zealand, Father’s Day falls on 6th September, order by late August. Growing kits make great ‘open on the day’ gifts because the planting itself is the first activity you do together.
Can children help choose and wrap these gifts?
Absolutely, and this makes the gift feel much more personal. Children aged 4 and up can choose between a herb kit and a pizza kit (show them both and let them decide). They can help write the growing promise card. They can arrange the trug or basket. The involvement of the child in the giving is part of what makes nature gifts feel different from ordered online and arrived in a box presents.
What about grandfathers or other father figures?
All of these gifts work equally well for grandfathers, stepfathers, uncles or any other paternal figure in a child’s life. A herb kit on a grandfather’s windowsill that a grandchild helped plant and tends on visits is one of the loveliest nature connections a child can have.
The gift that keeps growing
Father’s Day is on the summer solstice this year, the longest day, the height of the growing season. It’s a day made for being outside with small people who love you, with your hands in the soil and absolutely nowhere to be.