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

Toddler Garden Update

Poppet's garden has really flourished since we first planted it back in April.

She has been harvesting the fruits of her labour as things have come into bloom; it has grown into a lovely little spot for her to explore and play with her fairies in ( I finally got some on sale in ELC).

She loves finding her miniature strawberries but we have to keep telling her to wait till they turn red.....if she finds any especially small ones she takes them to Little.

Her greenhouse seedlings have mostly all died in assorted ways - the only five survivors are three pumpkin plants which are now flowering in the veg plot and two pea plants looking very pathetic in her garden that I doubt will come to much.

Her sunflower tunnel has grown loads. This was a couple of weeks ago and they are even bigger now and nearly flowering. One side is a lot higher than the other and I should probably have thinned the seedlings out a bit but it is getting there. Pretty soon they will be high enough to bend together and create a tunnel (it will probably be more of a crawl-through tunnel rather than a walk-through one).

Rain collects in the centre of the lupins and in little puddles in the folds of the broccoli leaves, and she loves finding these little reservoirs of water, using them as drinks and bathes for Fairy and Mr Rabbit.

The fuchsia flowers are 'princesses' apparently, and she likes picking off big, fat ones and tiny little ones and making little fuchsia flower families. Or pulling off the buds and picking the petals open to find the 'princess' inside. She has yet to discover the satisfying enjoyment that comes from popping the buds!

Her sweetcorn looks great, I think it may be ready to harvest but I am not sure, if anyone could tell me that would be good?! She seems quite curious about it and I'm not sure she entirely believes there is sweetcorn in there. Corn on the cob is one of her favourite foods so she is really going to love it when we can pick it.

The annual flowers we sowed a few weeks ago have shot up although are also a victim of overcrowding. They are now flowering and attracting bees and other insects to Poppet's garden. There are also loads of centipedes that live under them that she likes to look at as they scurry away. No insects have taken on our upturned flower pot as a home though!

Poppet: 2yrs 6mos

Little: 10 mos

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.

Toddler's Greenhouse Area

I love my greenhouse, I potter around in it nearly every day and Poppet loves to join me and help. Today their daddy made a wee area that she could claim as her own - this is what he came up with, I absolutely love it!

At the end of the greenhouse he put up a lower level bench and secured it, and then I collected all her gardening bits and bobs to lay out. I gave her a modular seed tray, her trowel and fork, her gardening gloves, pea and pumpkin seed packets, watering cans, plant pots, toilet rolls, egg and yoghurt cartons, and some sweetcorn and fuchsia plants. I also put a bucket of compost on the floor next to her bench.

Her Papa took her down to see it when she woke up from her nap, and I think she adores this area almost as much as I do! I envisage many hours are going to be spent here this summer and I'm so happy she can share a hobby with me. This afternoon she planted up some pea and pumpkin seeds in her little tray with some help from Papa, and watered them about 5 times. She was very happy!

A Fairy Garden

I remember creating little gardens in seed trays when I was little, so thought it would be a nice thing to try with Poppet. I had all of the things already apart from the glass beads which I picked up in town this morning for  £1.50.

We started off by sitting down together and reading some of Flower Fairies to set the scene, this got Poppet pretty excited about the prospect of a fairy garden but I have to say she did seem pretty disappointed at the lack of actual fairies when we were finished!

I laid out a seed tray, bucket of compost, trowel and rake, glitter, already painted shells, green glass beads, little bird house and some flowers from around the garden. We did this in the back garden, it's been another lovely warm day.

She started off filling the seed tray up with compost but lost interest so I finished filling it for her. I gave her a bit of direction as to where the fairy house should go and started off the garden path and she was away. 

For some reason she buried a lot of the glass beads. I can't remember if I did any seed planting with her last year which she might be remembering,  I don't think we did, but it seemed very much like she was treating them like seeds. The glitter as ever was very popular. The finished garden looked very pretty!

Ideally it would have been finished off nicely with a couple of toy fairies but unfortunately I don't have any so the garden is currently home to a panda and a horse. The fairy garden now has pride of place in her play garden. I'm hoping to sneak some fairies in there at some point to surprise her!

Toddler play garden

As an enthusiastic gardener myself, I have always intended to encourage the gardening bug in my children. I think its a really healthy interest to cultivate in little ones, and is something they are naturally drawn to with all the creepy crawlies, mud, fresh air and water play. With this in mind, we wanted to create a small toddler garden for Poppet to play freely in.

We chose an area that used to have a mini greenhouse thing on it (excuse the mess of the garden it is a work in progress) so it already had brick edging and good, diggable soil.

Poppet & Little's daddy knocked it all down so we were just left with a rectangle of soil. Then he rearranged some of the bricks to create a little entrance into her garden. I did some research online for ideas for elements to include, and this is what I came up with!

What is in the garden:

• A Flamingo Willow Tree (Salix Integra), that I had brought with us in a pot from our old flat and needed a new home
• A lavender plant for its lovely smell
• An alpine strawberry plant (miniature strawberry)
• An old Ikea candle lantern (spike removed). 
• Lots of pine cones
• A garden gnome, and angel wind chime that we found in the garden
• Ceramic bunny rabbit, bird on a stick and wooden bird house all from Poundland
• An upturned ceramic pot to encourage creepy crawlies
• Plant labels to stick in the ground.
• Plastic plant pots and a windowbox, for collecting things in
• Large pink quartz stone
• Watering can and children's gardening utensils
• Upturned vegetable crate to be used as a work bench

It has been very popular! One of her favourite things to do is to make 'hot chocolate' in her bucket using mud, water, and pinecones.

She can spend ages in there. Note the bunny in the lantern, apparently that is his house. Nana and Grandad also kindly got her a little pull along gardening truck so she has all her tools to hand!

It's not quite finished yet, we want to tidy up the brick work and aim to have a few more plants (hopefully some sunflowers, a fushia and maybe a vegetable like pumpkin). 

She also likes to wander into the greenhouse and water the plants with her little watering can!