Additions to the toddler play garden!

Poppet's garden is looking a bit more garden-like now we have added a few more plants to it - we've planted a couple of sweetcorn plants, some purple sprouting broccoli, a fuchsia (I loved these when I was little as the buds are so satisfying to pop and the little flowers look like ballerinas) and a thyme. Her alpine strawberry plant has grown a lot and is flowering and her little willow tree has leaves. I've also kept her garden well-weeded - I wish I could say the same about the rest of the garden!

We were lucky enough to receive a lovely little gardening set for Poppet from MoneySupermarket. It was the exact one I had been eying up at the garden centre so I was really chuffed! 

It came with 3 packets of seeds - Pansies, Sunflowers and mixed flowers, and we have spent a couple of lovely mornings planting them.

She loved the gloves but alas, the task of putting fingers into the correct places proved too much. I'll keep them aside until she is older. The watering can was put to use very quickly and she spent a good wee while watering everything in sight. Her watering method of choice is to concentrate on leaves and flowers, just like her Aunty Anna at the same age.

 

The back of the Pansies packet had a suggestion to grow the plants spelling out the child's name but Poppet is a bit young to appreciate that. She likes naming shapes so I decided to try growing them in shapes instead. I chose an empty border next to her garden and marked out a square and a circle using stones and then she started excitedly telling me to 'do a triangle!'. I don't know why she is so fond of triangles, she loves spotting them wherever we go. She's a real triangle fan. After that I did a star. This took me absolutely ages. I'm rubbish at doing stars on paper too but in stones on soil I was even worse. Stars are my downfall. But it looked quite star-like in the end.

Poppet poured the pansy seeds into a dish so we could investigate what they looked like.

Then we both sprinkled them into the shapes and covered them with compost. I'll have to keep an eye out for any stray pansy plants that appear outside of the shapes as Poppet was quite enthusiastic with her sprinkling! I hope the experiment works and we get some recognisable pansy shapes appearing later in the summer. Poppet also found a worm which made her day, obviously. It went up her jacket, eugh!

We had a plastic window box filled with pine cones in Poppet's garden so filled it up with compost and planted it up with the mixed flower seeds.

In only a few days these seeds have already germinated and she liked seeing all the little seedlings pop up through the soil.

I've been doing some research on sunflower houses and it is definitely something on my to-do list (once I have convinced J to let me dig up the lawn a little bit!). They are basically like dens made from sunflowers and sound magical. I will console myself with a sunflower tunnel of sorts for now. I thought it would make a nice entrance into Poppet's garden.

Unfortunately Little, who up to this point had been content crawling around the grass trying to eat dandelions, decided to get in on the gardening and knocked over our dish of seeds into the grass. Poppet and I spent a long time searching in the grass for enough sunflowers seeds to make our tunnel. I made two shallow trenches either side of the 'path' and Poppet scattered the seeds in.

I stuck bamboo sticks in either side and tied them together with string for support as the plants grow. The idea is that as the sunflowers get bigger they create a tunnel walkway into her garden and when they get tall enough I'll tie their tops together to make a roof.  Even if they don't get high enough for this they will still create a special entrance into Poppet's garden. I can't wait to see how it turns out!

She was really excited about 'her tunnel' as she already calls it. I also planted a few lobelia plants in either side to help define the path better and hopefully stop her stepping on the sunflower seedlings. She planted a couple in her garden too.

Once we were all finished I taught Poppet about the importance of keeping your tools in good condition! Here she is wiping the mud off them on the grass and putting everything back into her bag. She's a good little tidier-upper.

She is very proud of her little gardening set and enjoys carrying it around with her!

Indoors, we sat down and I started filling out a few of the seed labels for her and she copied me.....I love how she tried to make her squiggles look like actual writing....her emergent writing skills are really coming on and she definitely recognises that words have a meaning and purpose now.

This post is an entry for Britmums' #KidsGrowWild Challenge, sponsored by MoneySupermarket. We were sent the gardening kit for free for the purposes of this post.