Thursday, May 21, 2009

Dandelion Moneymaker for Kids

Is your lawn plagued with pesky dandelions? You could do what my dad did when we were growing up and pay your children to pick them. It solved a problem for him and gave us something fun and profitable to do during the summer!

My dad started out paying us a penny per dandelion, but after the first year, our zeal for the task increased and he had to lower the wage to 1/2 a penny per dandelion to keep us from running off with a fortune! (We had discovered that if you dig deep enough down into the dandelion plant, you can find dozens and dozens of buds at the base waiting to spring up- you can imagine what a goldmine we thought we had found once we made the discovery :-)

Have you come up with paid tasks that you find work well for both you and your children? I'd love to hear about them!

5 comments:

MaryAnne said...

My brother pays his kids to pull dandelions, it seems to work really well!

Unknown said...

My parents didn't pay us, but they did have us cut down thistles when they grew tall. We thought it was pretty fun and it cleaned up our lot.

Carissa B said...

We used to get paid to scoop slugs off the lawn / flowerbeds, etc. We got 2 cents per slug. We would get spoons and scoop them into a plastic shopping bag and then tie up the bag and put it in the outside trash can.

Living in Washington state (which has more than an abundance of slugs), we could make pretty decent [kid] money with this venture.

MaryAnne said...

My brother pays his kids to pull dandelions, it seems to work really well!

Carissa said...

We used to get paid to scoop slugs off the lawn / flowerbeds, etc. We got 2 cents per slug. We would get spoons and scoop them into a plastic shopping bag and then tie up the bag and put it in the outside trash can.

Living in Washington state (which has more than an abundance of slugs), we could make pretty decent [kid] money with this venture.