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

Egg Box Bats!

I have well and truly missed the boat with this one! But I figure I already have the photos so I might as well do the post, if nothing else it will remind me to do them (better) next year! I found the idea on Happy Clippings via Pinterest, their bats are a million times better than our ones but ours still looked great hung around the playroom/dining room in the run up to Halloween. And Poppet really loved making them. She likes bats because of the one that features in the Julia Donaldson book 'Monkey Puzzle' so was excited to be making a bat. And she made them entirely herself apart from I cut the wings outs (despite her cries of "I do it mum!")

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 To make them you need:

• egg boxes
• ribbon (in halloween colours preferably so orange or black, I didn't have any so we used gold and lime green)
• black paint
• a skewer/pencil/something to make a hole
• goggly eyes 

However I stumbled into difficulties pretty early on in proceedings when I realised we didn't have any black paint so was debating bundling the girls into the pushchair to make an emergency dash to the shops (we have a lot of these type of 'emergencies'). This sounded really unappealing and somewhere in the depths of my mind I seemed to recall that you can make black paint but I have never been good at that colour mixing malarky, I can just about remember that blue and yellow makes green and that is it. So a quick check with my good friend Google revealed that indeed, you can make black paint by mixing equal quantities of blue, yellow and red.

So we did that and as if by magic, black appeared! Poppet was as impressed by this as I was. I cut the egg boxes into 3 cup sections, and trimmed them so they would sit flat on the table. Then I cut 'wing shapes' from the two outer cups (n.b. could do better). Poppet's job was then to cover them in black paint which she did happily. We should have done the inside of them too but didn't think of it at the time.

We had some black paint left over so to use it up Poppet did some black handprints to look like a spider. You have to paint your hand black but not the thumb, so your spider has 8 legs. She really liked doing this. We added goggly eyes to the finished spider and cut him out and hung him up on a ribbon as well but I didn't get a photo of this so you will need to take my word for it.

Once the bats are dry (or, if you are like us, still tacky but you are too impatient to wait any longer), stick on some eyes and then make a hole in the top to hang them from. Poppet insisted she make the holes so under my supervision she carefully pushed the skewer through the tops.

And then carefully threaded a piece of ribbon through it (all great for fine motor skills/hand eye coordination!). I knotted the end for her a few times to keep the ribbon from falling out and our bats were finished! We made three in all, and they have now been packed away for next Halloween but only this morning Poppet was asking "where my bats gone?". 

Poppet: 2yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr 1 mos

A Digger in the Garden!

Things have been getting a little messy around here but it's all for the greater good! Grandad's been 'making a mess' according to Poppet, who has been keeping an eye on him. The arrival of the digger was a very exciting event for Poppet who has been watching all the developments in the garden with interest. Of course her own little digger had to join her while she watched him work. 

Helping Grandad dig the foundations

She even got a shot on the digger with Grandad, which she was a bit unsure of at first, but at the same time fascinated.

Daddy got a ride on the digger as well (not on Grandad's knee though), and managed to not hit any water mains! Whereas Grandad the experienced professional hit two in one day, but this just added even more excitement to Poppet's day!

The building site is set to continue for a few more months as we get an extension built so there will be lots more excitement in the garden in store for the girls (and mama who loves seeing the progress!).

Poppet: 2yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr 1mos

Jam Jar Pumpkins!

As soon as I saw this idea on Red Ted Art I made a mental note to try it ourselves. It combines two of Poppet's loves - glue and candles - so I knew it would capture her interest.

To make your pumpkin lantern, you will need a clean jam jar, orange tissue paper, black paper, a tea light candle (real or battery powered), watered down PVA glue and a paintbrush to apply it.

They really could not be easier to make. Start off by painting a layer of glue all over the jam jar, then cover the entire area with scraps of orange tissue paper.

Once you have covered all the glass, paint on another layer of glue to smooth all the tissue paper down, and then stick on a second layer of tissue paper. Apply another coating of the glue (this is the third and last!) to seal it all in and smooth it all down.

Finally, stick the bits of black paper in position to form the face, and paint some glue over the top of them to seal.

The finished luminaries are so simple, but look so cool when lit. A great alternative to the traditional pumpkin with the added benefit that they can be reused year after year!

The girls have enjoyed having dinner by flickering candlelight the last couple of days!

Poppet: 2 yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr 1mos

Monster Playdough

This was more halloween based fun and a really easy activity that kept Poppet happy for ages. Instead of monsters another idea would be to make playdough spiders. 

For this activity I put out the halloween playdough that we made recently along with some pipe cleaners, feathers and goggly eyes. Goggly eyes are one of Poppet's favourite crafting supplies, she just loves them and they are really cute.

Mummy Monster

The first monster she created was a 'mummy' one and this was followed by a 'daddy' one and then two cute little baby ones. It is funny how she always exactly replicates our family unit!  Poppet is very methodical with her goggly eye use now - she makes sure she picks two eyes the same size for each face, and is careful to give the babies little eyes and the adults big eyes (with the daddy having the biggest eyes and the mummy slightly smaller ones). She refused point blank to add a third eye on to any of her monsters, no thanks, I'm not falling for that one mum.

Daddy Monster

She stuck feathers in and declared that they were wings and her monsters could fly. She chose to use the pipe cleaners as mouths.  For the baby monsters she very carefully selected the very smallest feathers. It was also very important that the babies were given 'cots' and 'highchairs'.

Baby Monsters 

I found it interesting to compare Poppet's monsters to one she created much earlier in the year; she was much less strict with her eye usage back then! This particular monster had three eyes (third one is at the back) and two lollipop stick arms on top of his head.

Poppet: 2 yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr

Halloween Playdough

I think this may be the pinnacle of our playdough making! We made a batch of clove scented playdough using our usual recipe from The Imagination Tree, and then divided it into two balls. We coloured one orange (using red and yellow food colouring) and the other black and added some silver glitter as well. As usual I had to use a lot of food colouring. I have since read that some people use a squirt of a washable ready-made paint and that gives more vibrant colours so I think I will give that a try next time.

The smell of cloves was amazing (we just sprinkled ground cloves into the playdough mixture till it smelled right), very autumnal and warming. Perfect for playing with on crisp autumn days!

The resultant playdough, still warm and fresh from the bowl, enticed Poppet to play with it as soon as I put it out. It was really pliable and aromatic and I think she really liked having more than one colour to work with. 

I paired the playdough with a selection of our autumn treasures - acorns, sycamore seeds, pinecones, and leaves - and also put out a little bowl of whole cloves and some playdough utensils.

She used the lumps of playdough to stand up the twigs in to make little trees, so I showed her how to use balls of playdough to make the tree bigger and taller, adding in more branches. She really likes using the 'knife' and happily cut away at the playdough for ages (although insisted on using the knife upside down).

She experimented with making imprints in the playdough with the acorns and cones and seeing the shapes that they left behind. She was calling the acorn's cupules 'hats' and liked standing the acorns up in the playdough and then making sure they had a hat on. 

I thought to give her our recently decorated peg people, so we added them to our play and she had great fun fitting them all with their hats.

Grandad came in from working outside and assisted by showing Poppet that she could use little lumps of playdough to secure the hats to the heads.

Hatted people having a chinwag

The people had to have beds, of course, so Poppet tasked Grandad, Daddy and me with each making a bed for them. We all produced a bed, some more inventive, realistic and well just better than others but I won't name any names. All I will say is Poppet picked mine as the best and it had detachable covers and a pillow.

It was too hard to resist playing with the playdough and I also created a little garden and then a pumpkin which Poppet loved and insisted I made another. All afternoon she treasured those pumpkins along with the bed that I had made her.

They were all placed very carefully in her play kitchen cupboard and she was very insistent that I didn't put them away "Don't tidy this one mum. I love it mum. Don't tidy it up. I love it. Just look. Just leave it here. Don't tidy that up. I love it." She is at a stage just now where she declares her love for quite a lot of things!

Poppet's beloved objects. Please note the bed looked better when I first made it!

I am sorry to say that Grandad and Daddy's interpretations of a bed were placed in her other kitchen cupboard and I was given permission to tidy these up if I so wished.

This has been by far Poppet's favourite playdough and she has asked for it out to play more than any other I have made. I'm looking forward to making some Christmassy flavours in a few weeks!

Poppet: 2 yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr

Pumpkin Pictures

With Halloween approaching at the end of the month our activities have been taking on a pumpkiny feel to them.

As the girls are still so young I have deliberately kept things quite innocuous. Even when they are older I won't like things too spooky! We have been reading halloweeny theme books - The Owl That Was Afraid of the Dark, Winnie the Witch and Room on the Broom. All have become instant favourites.

We check on our pumpkin patch every couple of days - we have two big pumpkins (well, coconut sized ones and they are still green so I think we will still need to make a trip to the supermarket to buy a pumpkin for carving!). We made a 'bed' for them by placing some dried shrub branches under them to prevent rotting and Poppet likes to wash them if they get a bit dirty.

For our first piece of pumpkin art I cut out a pumpkin from orange card and then gave it to Poppet along with some orange tissue and paper. Together we glued on little bits all over the pumpkin until it was covered, being careful not to overlap any onto the eyes, nose or mouth holes.

I had a large bit of card left over from cutting the pumpkin out which she insisted was a crown and had to be stuck onto the pumpkin's head. We finished by mounting it onto some black card and sticking some green bits of paper on to the stem. Poppet loves glue so she really liked making this pumpkin picture.

For our second picture I gave Poppet a paper plate, scraps of orange papers again, and also black cut outs of eyes, a nose and a mouth. I left her to making a pumpkin of her own design; she decided to go straight for the black bits and gave the pumpkin plate a face, while the orange scraps were left. She added some orange pen and ta da! -the pumpkin was finished. 

Poppet: 2yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr