Finger Painting with the Garden

Okay, so my daughter (aka Bug) LOVES to play with her food. She will grab it off the spoon and smear it everywhere as she laughs and laughs. The problem is I want her to eat her food and not play with it. I was trying to come up with a way she could finger paint without using paint, since she still puts everything in her mouth and most paints (even clay based, natural ones) aren't too good for one to eat. I have a teeny-weeny garden (that I am working on expanding- that is a later post) and sometimes I have an excess of things, or they go bad before I pick them. Today, I decided my basil needed a haircut. If Bug were a little older, I would have her help me trim the basil and clean out vegetables, etc.

Once I gathered the basil, I pureed it in a small food processor with a little water. Once pureed, I poured the green goodness into a bowl and added flour slowly until it was thickened. I did the exact same thing with some beets that had gone bad. The beets created a pretty bright fuchsia color! 

While the overgrown portion of the basil and the slightly rotted beets were not ideal for cooking anymore, they were perfectly safe alternatives to real paint for Bug's first explorations in finger painting. Had she eaten any of the paint, she would have been perfectly fine. She had an absolute blast and it was not hard at all to clean up! You could also dry the artwork in the sun and laminate it if you wanted to save it for the fridge or wall. What a great extension activity for a home, community, or school garden!