Our First Vegetable Plot

Our very first harvest

One of my favourite things about our new house is it's garden (I say new, but we have been here nearly two years now). It came complete with a greenhouse (or two) and a sizeable, if neglected, vegetable plot. The first year we were here we didn't do much garden wise as the house needed a lot of work and I was heavily pregnant in the summer.

So this year was the first year we attempted proper vegetable growing. We have had so many great harvests from the garden! It has been such a great experience for the girls seeing from start to finish where their vegetables are coming from. Little has been too little to help much but Poppet has been involved in every stage, from the planting, to the weeding, to watering, to her favourite part - the harvesting. In the height of summer it would be our routine while Little was napping in the morning to visit the garden and see what was ready for picking, and everyday we would return with something. I think I probably bored facebook with my 'look what we grew!" posts but I was so proud of our hauls!

It has definitely encouraged the girls to try foods they wouldn't previously. Poppet just would not eat tomatoes until we grew them. Now, I can hardly make it back to the house from the greenhouse before she has popped all the delicious sweet sunlight-warm tomatoes into her mouth. She will happily crunch raw runner-beans straight from the plant. And her absolute favourite food is pickled beetroot! Actually it hasn't made much change to Little's eating habits as she already eats pretty much anything you put in front of her.

Gardening helped Poppet get over her dirt-aversion. This was a girl who didn't like getting her hands dirty and hated being barefoot in grass. She just loved helping to dig up the potatoes especially when she found a worm!

Making friends with the worms

Trying to photo our veggie loot before Poppet eats it all

Not strictly vegetable related, but our sunflower tunnel eventually got big enough to be a tunnel of sorts, Poppet liked it anyway but it looked a bit untidy. My plan next year is for a sweet pea tunnel, but even bigger! Shhh, I haven't broken it to the other adult of the house yet......

The Sunflower Tunnel

We had an abundance of tomatoes, they were my favourite thing to grow I think. Poppet liked to go collecting the ripe ones "There's another one mama!" and shared my annoyance when we returned from our holidays to discover a cat had made his bed in some plants and trampled them. Now when she sees a cat in the garden she asks "Is that a bloody cat mum?" Oooops!

The sweetcorn looked really impressive, and Poppet already LOVES corn on the cob so I though we couldn't go wrong but our homegrown ones just didn't taste as good as shop bought ones so that is one vegetable I will stick to buying rather than growing.... which is a shame because Poppet loved pulling the husks off (which is actually quite hard!) and then unwrapping them, and seemed just as amazed each time to find sweetcorn inside!

Pulling off a sweetcorn husk

Our pumpkin plants had been through a lot so I was not expecting much from them! Poppet planted the seeds back in April with her Papa but her seedling care left a lot to be desired. Three small plants survived that we transplanted out to the vegetable plot and watched flower. Lovely big yellow flowers. At first all the flowers were male ones and I was getting worried we would get no pumpkins but then the female ones appeared with their swollen tiny baby pumpkins and Poppet loved watching them grow. Until the day that Grandad arrived with his digger and promptly dumped a load of topsoil over them (well it had to go somewhere!).

A 'baby' pumpkin

We managed to rescue two pumpkins and dig them free of the soil, and waited to see if they would orange up in time for Halloween. They didn't - one died and the other stayed green and grapefruit sized. We will succeed next year!

Eating a bean

Runner beans were another easy crop, they just kept on coming! I still have bags of them in the freezer. Poppet loved picking them, and even eating them raw but she was not a fan of them cooked. Neither was Little or Daddy, so maybe we will try another bean next time.

We will definitely be growing beetroot again next year. It was so easy to grow and Poppet loved pulling them up out of the ground. We pickled jars and jars of the stuff, had it raw sliced into salads, roasted it, made risotto out of it (this was the only form of it that Poppet would not eat). Poppet particularly liked using it as a lipstick at dinner time.

Pulling up the beetroots

Holding her prize aloft

So there it is, our first year of vegetable growing. Hopefully next year will be even more successful! And I will have another helper in the form of Little who will be a lovely age next Spring to help plant some seeds.

Poppet: 2yrs 9mos

Little: 1 yr 1 mos